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LIBRARY QFCQNGRESS, 

Chap.TT__:_ Copyriglit No. 

Shelf.i_H._5. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THINGS AS THEY ARE 

By BOLTON HALL 



THINGS 
AS THEY A 

By / 

BOLTON HALL 

Author o/*Even as You and I 
With an Introduction by 

George D. Herron 



R E 




Boston 
Small, Maynard & Company 

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aynard if Company 

Incorporated} 



Entered at Stationers' Hall 



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DEDICATED TO 

WALTER L. SINTON 
TEACHER OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 

WHOSE LETTERS FORMED 
THE BASIS OF THIS BOOK 



Preface. 

The chapters which compose the first part of 
this volume are designed to show, in a logical 
manner, the purpose and the order of the de- 
velopment of man. Man learns but slowly by 
experience, unless he perceives the principles to 
be apprehended and the way of the Eternal 
teaching. 

The parables were written to illustrate these 
principles,, as set forth in the opening chap- 
ters ; but, except in a few cases, it has been 
tJwuglit better not to indicate the application 
in the text. Those who cannot receive the 
essays are asked to read the parables, those 
who cannot receive the parables are asked to 
read the essays, before passing final judgment 
on their message. 

Some of the parables and parts of the essays 
have been published in Collier's Weekly, the 
vii 



Preface 

Criterion, the Outlook, the Christian En- 
deavor World, the Ram's Horn, the Arena, 
the New Voice, and the Philistine, to the 
Editors of all of which my thanks are due for 
permission to republish. 

BOLTON HALL. 

New York City, 
September, 1899. 



Vlll 



Introduction. 

The spiritual philosophy of the kingdom of 
heaven is profoundly and simply presented in 
Things as They Are. The roots of social 
wrong and the principles of social right are 
vividly shown by parables. The intellectual 
and moral entanglements which result from 
attachment to vested interests, the puerility of 
much that is called science, the pitiable little- 
ness of professional religion, are set forth with 
what might be called a merciless sweetness of 
spirit. The exposition of the law of love, at 
the end of tJie letters, reads like a new epistle 
from Saint John. 

Subjectively, — that is, as regards our own 
minds, — the kingdom of heaven is a state in 
which a man loves all his kind, and lives in 
commtcnion with the love that is the substance 
of all things, without regard to reward or 
return. Self is eliminated from the horizon 
of thought and purpose. The affections enter 
that region of boundless selflessness in which 
one bestows all there is of himself upon the 
ix 



Introduction 

evil and the good, the loving and the unlov- 
ing, the farthest and tlie nearest, without esti- 
mating the worth of one above another. He 
does not value his personal existence. He has 
no "interests" He fives in a universal com- 
munism of love. He dwells in a realm in 
which there is neither "mine" nor "thine" 
a realm beyond the reach of weights and 
measures, morals and laws. All there is of 
God is his, and all there is of himself is his 
brethren' s. Nothing can happen to him, be- 
cause he has nothing to do with happenings. 
From his point of view, nothing is evil. 
Beneath the shadows and the appearances 
of things, he abides in eternal love and life. 
Where he is, there is only good, love, and 
liberty. 

Objectively, — that is, as regards the universe, 
— the kingdom of heaven is a society in which 
all men work for the common good, and each 
receives according to his needs or power to 
use ; a society in which no man calls any- 
thing his own, because all belongs to every 
one ; a society in which there is neither wage 



Introduction 

nor interest, neither pi'ice nor bargain ; a so- 
ciety in which there is no more qtcestion about 
how much one shall have over and above an- 
otJier than there is question about a division 
of the air for individual breathing. The 
coming kingdom of heaven on earth will 
realise, in all economic facts, the highest in- 
ward aspirations of the soul. Until there is 
a perfect harmony of these subjective and ob- 
jective spheres, tliere can be no escape from 
social misery and tragedy. Only the civilisa- 
tion that gives to him that asks, that turns 
not away from him that would borrow, that 
sends its highest privileges upon the evil and 
the good, that distributes all there is by an 
all-inclusive and non-exclusive voluntary com- 
munism, can realise the social perfection of 
our Father in heaven, who freely giveth us 
all things ; who, zvhen the sons of men had 
wasted or shut up the already prodigally given 
resources of the woi'ld of spirit and things, - 
undertook to redeem them by giving them 
more spirit and more things. 

It thus turns out that from the point of 



Introduction 

view of a citizen of the kingdom of heaven, 
there is 710 such thing as a merely economic 
question. The land question, for instance, is 
a spiritual question, a problem of spiritual 
liberty, a matter of the salvation or destruc- 
tion of human souls. It is only through the 
use of the land that the race can find spiritual 
unity with God, 

Can such a society ever become a fact? Is 
the kingdom of heaven indeed at hand? We 
might change the question, and ask if any- 
thing else seems likely to be practicable. 

What is history and experience but an open 
book, 011 every page of which we may 7'ead, 
in blood-red letters, the zvaste and misery, the 
utter impracticability and imbecility, of any- 
thing and everything that is not obedience to 
the latv of love. 

When we really desire the kingdom of 
heaven, we shall see that it has been at hand 
all through the time of our wandering in 
the wilderness of experience and speculation. 

When the desire for the kingdom is strong 

enough, the ways afid means will speedily 

xii 



Introduction 

appear. It is desire that creates function, in 
both natural and spiritual development. It 
would be infinitely easier, if we only knew 
it, actually to realise the kingdom of heaven 
in the structure and organism of society than 
it is to make a better order by the thou- 
sand tinkerings, compromises, and "scien- 
tific methods" which we usually undertake. 

The desire will be created by putting and 
keeping the idea of the kingdom of heaven be- 
fore tlie minds of men until the thought of the 
people begins to gather about it. The apostles 
of the kingdom are sent to overcome the world 
by the witness of their faith. It is the ideal 
and the passion for it which have been the 
sole making force of history. This is the 
thesis of Hegel and Saint Paul. We can es- 
tablish the kingdom in objective and economic 
facts only by first establishing it in human 
thought and faith. " When the ideal once 
alights in our streets," says Edward Carpen- 
ter, " we may go in and take our supper in 
A peace : the rest will be seen to." 

*See Fable, " The Visionary ." 

xiii 



Introduction 

That there is no individual extrication 
from social wrong is the blessing of both the 
individual and society. The passion for in- 
dividual extricatio7i is really the evasion of 
individual responsibility. The only Christ- 
ian innocence in a world of wrong is the sac- 
rifice of one ' s own life in bearing away that 
zvrong. Only through the emancipation of 
the whole hitman life ca7i the citizen of tlie 
kingdom realise his full liberty and citizen- 
ship. Only so, can we live the life of love y — 
the life of the Son of God. No man of love 
zvill wish to be extricated from the common 
wrong except as a part of the common life. 
He dares not seek a perfection that separates 
him from his brethren. He zvill no more 
drink of the fruit of the vine until the king- 
dom of God be full come y zvhe?t he can drink 
it in fellowship with all his brethren in the 
ransomed society. 

GEORGE D. HERRON. 

Department of 
Applied Christianity, 
University of Iowa. 



Contents. 

PAGB 

A Counsel of Perfection 5 

A Search for Contentment . . 2j 

Our Triplex Nature 37 

The Law in Ourselves 49 

The World's Pain . . 65 

The Deliverance from Bondage 79 

The Land Question jii 

Making for Righteousness 125 

The End of Desire 141 

FABLES: 

The Generation of Vipers 151 

The Comfortable Comforters 152 

Failures of the Ages 153 

The Joy of the Working 155 

The Motive Power 157 

A Masque of Life 159 

The Better Way 163 

A Finance Committee 166 

The Inspiration of the Mighty 171 

The Clarion that calls ....... 172 

Current Economic Literature 174 

xv 



Contents 



Dividing the Spoils 178 

The Sins of the World 181 

Of One Flesh 182 

Monopoly's Plea for Charity 184 

The Revolutionists 1S6 

How " Progress " stopped 188 

The Sans-culottes 200 

Philosopher Dog 203 

A License to live 208 

Is thy Tenant a Dog? 211 

A Clean Heart 214 

Monopoly 216 

In the Jurisdiction of God 218 

Rise and Progress of a Soul 221 

An Allegorical Boat 223 

Competition 227 

Remedial Measures 232 

Sauve qui Peut 235 

to satisfy the hungry man 237 

A Business Crash 240 

The Rev. Heavenly Holmes on the Incor- 
ruptible Inheritance 244 

Grief, and the End of Grief 253 

The Division of Labour 255 

The Little Rationalist 256 

xvi 



Contents 



PA OB 

The Golden Dollar and the Mergen 

Thaler 257 

Reconstruction 260 

Lords of the Air 261 

The Natural Bent 267 

An Imaginary Conversation 269 

The Submerged Tenth 271 

The Public Beneficiary 273 

The Right to the Use of the Man . . . 276 

The Consolations of Scientific Religion . 279 

Relative Right 280 

All Satisfied 282 

" Separate from Sinners " . . * 284 

An Appeal to Force 285 

A Brother's Keeper 287 

A Visionary 291 



Things as They Are 



I. A COUNSEL OF PERFECTION. 

A social experiment, — The Golden Rule im- 
practicable alike for employer and employee. — 
Evil ride makes evil deed — Education by 
action. — The illumination. — Honesty unwork- 
able in practice. — Suicide not a refuge. — No 
escape by withdrawal or martyrdom. — Pro- 
test, 



I. 
A Counsel of Perfection. 

The following is the experience, given, as 
nearly as possible in his own words, of one 
who tried to follow the Golden Rule. He 
is a man of unusual health, ability, and en- 
ergy, but is unfitted for a tranquil career in 
the world, because his mental and his spirit- 
ual natures are so developed that he is unable 
to accept what he knows and feels to be un- 
true. Had he been less intellectual or had 
he been shielded by circumstances, such as 
inherited wealth or the possession of a 
monopoly, he might long have persuaded 
himself that he was fulfilling the whole law 
of love, while actually living at ease on his 
fellows. 

Only such circumstances can blind any 
one who follows his convictions to the una- 
voidable consequences of right doing, that 
prevent even an approach to perfect obedi- 
ence to the Golden Rule. 

"I was, " says this man, "a birthright 
5 



Things as They Are 

member of the Quaker body, and from my 
youth was filled with the Quaker spirit. I 
was impelled to do unto others as I would 
be done by, and to love my neighbour as my- 
self, in every-day life and action; and what 
did it bring me to? Want! I lost all I 
had, as men told me I would. I inherited 
a fine farm and an interest in a prosperous 
factory. I had a good common -school edu- 
cation and excellent health, but these could 
not save my material wealth from the dis- 
astrous effects of trying to do right. A 
sample of how it worked will suffice. 
When a lad, I had sold some cows at the 
market, and spoke of the price I had gotten. 
Every one said I had gotten some shillings 
per head more than the cattle were worth. 
'Then, ' said I, *I will go and give the sum 
back to the purchaser. ' The very ones from 
whom I had my training laughed at me. 
But I did give it back. In the factory I 
paid, not the least that the hands could be 
got to work for, but what seemed to me a 
fair living wage. It is not hard to see how 

6 



A Counsel of Perfection 

soon all that, under our system of commer- 
cial and industrial warfare, parted my prop- 
erty and me. 

" Then I was accused, even by reformers, 
of being hyper-sensitive and over-scrupulous. 
Having lost my all, I had to seek employ- 
ment from other persons. I thought at the 
time, not understanding economics and so- 
cial laws, * Surely, now I can carry out the 
Golden Rule ! ' But, alas ! I found the very 
reverse the case. In every situation, I had 
to tell lies orally or to act them, to cheat, 
to do everything that can be conceived of as 
the reverse of the Golden Rule or of any 
kind of right-doing. Now I was in a fix. 
I had arrived at the end of my tether ; for I 
could find no place or condition on this 
earth in which I could do right and get 
enough to sustain life. Either I had to 
give up the whole Christian .religion as 
totally impractical, a cheat of the first 
water, and die, — for the impulse to act the 
Golden Rule, having become second nature, 
made life too painful for me to live under 

7 



Things as They Are 

such conditions, — or, before taking the final 
stand, and refusing any further action, which 
would also entail death, to look a little 
deeper, and see what were the obstacles 
which prevented me, as an individual, from 
getting a living and at the same time carry- 
ing out, in every-day life, the Golden Rule. 
"Remember, the teachers of my time 
maintained that an individual could observe 
the rule independently of any one else, and 
make a living. And this is where the or- 
thodox teachers have such a hold on the 
people; for most people believe it is their 
own particular fault that they don't do right 
in every-day life, and always blame them- 
selves, and believe they could do right- 
eously, independently of any one else, if 
they liked. So long as their teachers keep 
them under this delusion, we can do nothing 
with them: this is why the churches have 
been the greatest obstacles to reform. Their 
officers are of the order of the priests of old, 
who were always denounced by the prophets. 
Here was I, willing to practise righteous- 

8 



A Counsel of Perfection 

ness at any cost; and yet finding it impossi- 
ble. Here I was at death's door in conse- 
quence. I must either do right — which 
means doing nothing, and death by starva- 
tion as the result — or find out why I could 
not live and do right. This difficulty 
brought me to the end of the first lesson as 
to the sense in which we are 'guilty ' ; 
brought me into contact with the general 
laws governing our whole social fabric, and 
opened my spiritual understanding. In in- 
vestigating these laws, some of which are 
governmental and sustained by force, and 
others conventional and enforced by custom, 
I was driven to the conclusion that both set 
of laws are artificial and man-made, having 
no fixed natural or divine foundation; and 
that, instead of promoting righteousness, 
which is right-doing, in the present, they 
are producing crime and misery, — the very 
conditions they profess to destroy. 

"On further study, I was led to the inevi- 
table conclusion that I am only an atom 
among the aggregate individuals governed by 

9 



Things as They Are 

these laws ; and that, as an atom, it is impos- 
sible for me to act contrary to these laws 
and remain in the body, since all my bodily 
surroundings are governed and arranged by 
them : I found that we are individually 
controlled by the laws that we make collec- 
tively. Hence, if the laws are bad, the in- 
dividual, notwithstanding his desire to be 
good, must obey them, or become an outlaw. 
Therefore, if he obeys them, he is, from the 
individual standpoint of good, a sinner; and, 
if he refuses, from the collective or legal 
point of view, a criminal. 

"This at once explained why, from my 
first attitude as an individual, I found it 
impossible in every-day life to carry out the 
Golden Rule. It also forced upon me the 
conclusion that my individual attempts to be 
virtuous or to satisfy my own conscience, 
were actually hurting me and all humanity 
both morally and materially : hence that, so 
long as the present system lasts, I am power- 
less as an individual to do right in the 
smallest degree. 

10 






A Counsel of Perfection 

"This enlargement of my vision deepened 
and corrected my first or individual con- 
science, which was always thinking of the 
result of my actions on myself, and forced 
me to think of the result of my actions on 
other persons, first materially and afterward 
mentally and spiritually. This revelation 
of the control of law on the material plane, 
did not help me out of my first difficulty as 
to doing right : it merely explained why I 
could not do right as an individual or inde- 
pendently of others, and emphasised the 
general wrong-doing. 

"I saw that, under the present systems, 
we receive the greatest material benefits from 
spendthrifts, blackguards, and destroyers, 
and should continue to bless them and to 
build monuments to them. Thrift is a curse. 
It is the people that recklessly demolish 
wealth who keep the wheels going. 'Our 
present industrial system, ' says Rev. Herbert 
N. Casson, Ms actually built on such an in- 
sane plan that it rejoices in waste. "No 
waste, no business. " When a great fire oc- 
ii 



Things as They Are 

curs, the carpenters and masons rejoice; when 
sickness is prevalent, the doctors and drug- 
gists smile; and, whenever a death occurs, 
some undertaker is made happy. ' The great- 
est material benefit the labouring people 
could have would be the sudden death of half 
of them; or, failing that, to dump half the 
wealth of the country into the sea. Either 
of these would raise wages, lower rents, and 
really 'improve the condition of the poor/ 

"I saw that this should not be, and that 
our social system is unequalled for producing 
devils. It puts a premium on laziness. It 
promotes prodigality, produces intemperance 
and unnatural habits in eating, drinking, 
clothing, and is the fruitful source, directly 
or indirectly, of almost all irregularities in 
sexual relations. 

"Here, again, I was brought face to face 
with death; for, if I refused to conform to 
these laws which directly or indirectly 
perverted every action of my life, I would 
soon be forcibly put out of existence. From 
my new standpoint, then, life was too pain- 
12 






A Counsel of Perfection 

ful to live, where I had continually to take 
my neighbour by the throat to put bread and 
butter in my mouth. There seemed nothing 
but death before me ; and I longed for it, if 
there were no way out of the difficulty. My 
whole world had come to an end, and my 
heaven had passed away : nothing was left to 
me. I was heart-broken, and in the depths 
of despair and hell. I wished I had never 
been born. I saw no help in my lifetime; 
and, like Richter's man reviewing the uni- 
verse, I wanted to lie down and be hidden 
from the persecution of the Infinite. Then 
came my full illumination, and in it I saw 
that I was a father trying to shirk the re- 
sponsibility of rearing his children. I saw 
the suffering entailed by having to associate 
continually with those who were not on my 
own platform. In the new light, having 
daily to conform to the bad customs and 
laws made by the majority, I understood what 
was meant by being 'all things to all men/ 
and 'All things are lawful unto me, but all 
things are not expedient.' For, when our 

13 



Things as They Are 

desires are in accord with all the law of the 
universe, the fulfilling of those desires must 
be lawful. I realised now what it was to 
suffer on the cross, what it was to have to 
bear the sins of others. I found now, that I 
myself was freed from sin, not being a willing 
party to it ; but, for the sake of others, I had 
to go on doing the things my soul revolted 
against. In other words, I had, as a natural 
man, to return and pitch pennies with chil- 
dren. Not that I approve of or prefer pitch 
and toss, but that this was the only platform 
upon which I could meet the children and 
on which they could understand me." 

Such is the course of spiritual experi- 
ence by which one is brought to the lofty 
meekness which inherits the earth, to that 
state in which we spread out our hands, so 
that we catch all the blessings of the Beati- 
tudes. 

If we act honestly with ourselves, doing 

the things which we profess to believe, we 

must come, either by death or life, to a new 

and higher existence. In what respects an 

14 



A Counsel of Perfection 

attempt at partial honesty, with regard 
to others, is desirable, each, in his cir- 
cumstances, must decide for himself. The 
question should really be, "Is dishonesty 
or cheating ever justifiable to one who 
believes that acts have a moral quality in 
themselves? " " Is to lie, ever loving? " is 
another and a more difficult question. 

To be honest is, neither to deceive nor to 
take anything, however necessary for our- 
selves, from any one, without giving him a 
full and satisfactory equivalent. That is, it 
is to fulfil the Golden.Rule. But, it is easy 
to see the impossibility, under existing 
conditions, of so much as verbal honesty. 
Truthfulness brings its natural reward in 
the faith that it creates, often most valuable 
on critical occasions, but it results in mar- 
tyrdom, in greater or less degree : so does 
all right-doing in the world as we have 
made it. 

Our difficulties in doing right do not 
arise only in the strategies of war or other 
extraordinary situations. 

15 



Things as They Are 

Nearly every one will assert that we 
ought to tell the truth and no lies. But so 
different are our theoretic and our actual be- 
liefs, and so independent the practices gov- 
erned by them, that we find, upon the at- 
tempt to apply our principle, that it is in- 
stantly repudiated. 

Every doctor knows that his patients would 
not tolerate his telling the truth. The ner- 
vous invalid is seriously ill, "must be kept 
from all excitement, M asks if he is in any 
danger. "Oh, dear, no! We shall be all 
right in a few days. " (Dear, kind doctor!) 
"Well," says the nurse, "at the worst, that 
is an innocent white lie. ,J 

The lady's maid must lie as nicely as she 
sews. One can't be rude, and say one is 
engaged or "begs to be excused": that 
sounds so inhospitable. Besides, some 
people will say, "Oh, she will see me," 
and come in anyway. Much better say the 
lady is out, or "not at home," — a mere 
phrase, a conventionality, which everybody 
understands. (Everybody, that is, except 
16 



A Counsel of Perfection 

those who, if they did, would insist on send- 
ing up their names, and those who would 
think the truth inhospitable or discover, 
thereby, that we are inhospitable.) 

And, then, people have no business to ask 
if one is 'in* : they should say, 'Is she re- 
ceiving?' If they do get deceived, it is 
their own fault. Then all the little courte- 
sies, 'Happy to see you!' 'Such a pleasant 
visit ! ' and so on. Why, society would be 
a bear-garden without them, even if they are 
untrue !" So it would: for living falsely 
necessitates falsehoods. 

The bank cashier, again, the jailer from 
whom the combination or the key is de- 
manded at dead of night, the request empha- 
sised by a revolver: surely, he is not 
bound to tell the truth. Spencer says, 
"There is no moral relation between the 
parties. " He cannot be expected to sacri- 
fice his life for $100,000, which the trust 
company would hardly miss, nor even for 
$10,000, which would wreck the village 
savings-bank. Let him give them the wrong 
17 



Things as They Are 

numbers, and frustrate crime and save his 
own skin, or let them take the money he is 
pledged to protect ! 

Beautiful and convenient morality ! Such 
a handy thing to have in the house in an 
emergency. ! As a Christian lady told her 
child, who declined to say, "Glad to see 
you," "You must always say that, because 
it pleases people, whether it is true or not. " 
Our success depends upon pleasing people. 

Yet all this has its disadvantages. It 
does happen that, when the invalid is ner- 
vous only, not ill, and is told so, he still 
worries, because he thinks, " They only say 
lam all right so as not to frighten me." 
Nay, even when he is really getting well, 
and the doctor says, "We must cheer him 
up: hope will be more than medicine, " he 
still thinks, "All this is a part of this affec- 
tionate system of lies: I am much worse." 
To be sure, the friend whom the fair one 
wishes to see, is uncertain whether she 
really is at home or away; and it is 
necessary now and then to call over the 

18 



A Counsel of Perfection 

banister that she was only constructively 
"out. " Sure enough, it is demoralising 
to a trusted officer to have to make up his 
mind beforehand that he will be a coward 
or a traitor, if only enough inducements be 
held out, or, at least, if he be in sufficient 
danger. Then it is hard to get servants who 
have so nice a moral sense that they will lie 
for us, but not to us, and yet are not sensitive 
when we expose the lies we ordered. 

If the banker may lie to save $ 1,000,000 
from the burglars, so may he for $100,000, 
or for $10,000, or for $100. Even for a 
dollar he may tell a small lie, and a "little 
one for a penny. " Yet how can he help 
telling lies, and live ? 

If a matter of life and death will excuse 
deception, then danger of death must, — 
even some danger, or at least certainty of 
serious injury in a serious case; and "one 
cannot be too careful : any illness may prove 
serious." 

Of course, deception, when willingly done, 
brings its own punishment, not only in in- 
19 



Things as They Are 

ability to get credence, but in the actual 
giving over to the belief of a lie. Let the 
practice go far enough, and the patient be- 
comes unable to distinguish whether what 
he says is true at all or not. Ay: in order 
to excuse himself and to quiet his con- 
science, the sinner will deliberately set 
himself to believe the falsehood he has told. 
"I thought he would get better. " "I really 
didn't remember the combination for the 
moment. ' ' * 

" First I told him some lies. Then he 
told me some lies. He knew that I was 
lying, and I knew that he was lying. I 
knew that he knew that I was lying, and he 
knew that I knew that he was lying; and 
I knew that he knew that he was lying, and 
he knew that I knew that he knew that I 
was lying. Then we made our trade." 

* The foregoing discussion of practical truthfulness was rejected by 
the New York Observer, Evangelist, Independent, Christian Union, 
the Chicago Interior, and others, on the various grounds that "the 
editor did not agree with your conclusions,'' that it was "too radi- 
cal," that it was " not well to discuss such questions," that it was " out 
of our line," and so on. Such are the ecclesiastical guides to the 
kingdom. 

20 



A Counsel of Perfection 

Is not that an ordinary procedure in 
"striking a bargain?" 

An interesting book called Who Lies? 
published by DeWolfe, Fiske & Company, 
Boston, illustrates the impossibility of 
honesty in our society. 

There is no escape from these difficulties. 
To end our lives on earth, by lack of con- 
formity to conditions or of proper care, or 
by reckless overwork, is but to shirk our 
lesson here. 

Nor will it do, either to isolate ourselves, 
like anchorites, or to expose ourselves to 
death by refusing to conform our actions to 
the circumstances in which we find ourselves. 
Either course is merely to smother our 
voices; and, if we still the voices which 
can teach, and allow men to slay all the 
prophets, who shall prophesy to them ? That 
would be only to keep back the development 
that we might have helped. 

Martyrdom attracts attention and shows 
earnestness, but gives no explanation of that 
earnestness. It has secured comparative 

21 



Things as They Are 

freedom for thought and some freedom of 
speech from physical repression, and more 
martyrdom will be needed before we win 
these rights entirely; but, in other matters, 
its effect has probably been much exagger- 
ated. Martyrdom is purely a protest ; and, 
when expression is prohibited by force, it is 
the only protest possible. 

It is not permissible for an enlightened 
man to sacrifice himself or his powers to 
all, as did Buddha in yielding himself to be 
eaten by the famished tigress. That was but 
a step, a necessary step, in his development. 
True self-sacrifice consists in co-operating 
with the divine law of evolution, that works 
in ourselves and in others, as soon as we 
recognise it. It is simply leaving the 
worse things for the better, when we see a 
better thing. 

Nor should we allow ourselves to take to 
ourselves any more pain than we can avoid, 
on account of the folly or wrong-doing of 
others. Put the suffering where it belongs, 
because you love the sufferer. To do other - 
22 



A Counsel of Perfection 

wise is to take the children away from school. 
It may grieve you to see them arduously 
learning, but it cannot be helped. The only 
practical thing to be done is to teach and to 
protest, — to be the voice of one crying, if 
only in the wilderness, "Prepare ye the 
way ! " No other course is open. 



23 



II. A SEARCH FOR CONTENTMENT. 

The struggle for existence among members of 
one body evolves love. — Universal responsibil- 
ity. — Governmenty the result of the sum of 
zvills, not of force. — Great and small alike an- 
swerable for war. — Shows order in nature. 



II. 

A Search for Contentment. 

"For the things that are pleasant to 
have, for food, and for the best places in 
which to live, there is a competition among 
all living beings. " The stronger in body 
or in wit get these things; and the weaker, 
"those less fitted to survive, " are starved 
or pushed aside. Each creature struggles 
and devotes life trying to get good for itself 
or for its young. We are part of its 
struggle; and each of us takes from others 
the means of living, or even life itself, in 
order to secure good for ourselves. 

As all are struggling for the same objects, 
all the rest are opposed to each one of us. 
And every competitor is engaged in counter- 
acting our plans and in bringing us to 
nought. This is called "the pursuit of 
happiness. ' ' 

Therefore, not even an antelope or an 
ant can live or die independently. It must 
either help its kind, in its degree, or injure 
27 



Things as They Are 

its kind, or perhaps, in some measure, how- 
ever unconsciously, do both. We can choose 
only as to whether our competition shall be 
aimed to help or to hinder our fellows. 

But the road to heaven lies through hell : 
through war comes peace. Suffering and 
death follow imprudence and weakness, to 
teach us wisdom and strength. Affection be- 
gan with the attraction of male and female 
and with the necessity of defending each 
other, and the first conception of retribution 
sprang from revenge. Afterward this rose to 
the idea of justice. Accordingly, by natural 
and by sexual selection, by fights with each 
other and war with his kind, man has devel- 
oped the ideas of prudence, of compassion, 
and of justice. Now we begin to understand 
that this fight for existence is not the object 
of life, but only the training for life; that 
not even a few can really succeed while every 
one opposes all the rest; that, as we rise 
higher socially and spiritually, we rise above 
the arena, and, looking down upon it, we 
see the brutality of it, and set ourselves to 
28 



A Search for Contentment 

cure the state of conflict with one another in 
which all are continually involved. We be- 
gin to think that it may be possible to love 
our neighbour as part of ourselves; and, in- 
stead of despairing of others, or of thinking 
of our own partial interests, we try to cor- 
rect the conditions which force us to take 
part in wars, social and international, which 
we know to be wrong, but of which we are, 
nevertheless, part cause. For man is a so- 
cial animal % and each individual is a part 
of the social community, and, to the extent 
of the influence he might exert, a part of its 
government, and is, in that degree, respon- 
sible for it and for its doings. It is said 
that every nation has the best government 
for which it is fit, and this is true; for gov- 
ernment rests not upon force, but upon com- 
mon purposes, and the purpose is only an 
aggregate of the wills of the individuals of 
the nation.* 

* The anarchist's contention that "all government rests, in the last 
resort, on force," is not true, unless "force" be used to include moral 
influence. Children are sometimes governed, by wise and affectionate 
parents, without force. It is so that ants govern one another. For 

29 



Things as They Are 

That "he who wears a fetter needs it, 
and he who bears a kick deserves it," 
is true only of communities. The indi- 
vidual may struggle in the fetter and re- 
sent the kick, but he will be subjected to 
them till his fellows also, desire to be freed 
from them. 

example, there is nothing to prevent one or more ants from seceding. 
Probably they sometimes do. 

In a low state of moral development, resistance to aggression rests 
upon force ; not in a high one. The boycott is not force, and is the 
common and most effectual means of inducing men to live socially; 
for instance, if you invite a man to dine, and he insult your wife, only 
a rough would kick him out. She would retire, and probably he would 
also, and you would simply refrain from inviting him again ; nor would 
there be the slightest chance of his endeavouring to force himself into 
your house, unless it might be gently, for the purpose of making an 
apology. 

The desire for approval is one of the strongest motives we have, and 
is ordinarily sufficient for all communal control. Where the boycott is 
used, it need not be, and is not ordinarily, of such a character as to de- 
prive the subject of a tolerable existence. It is like the " sending to 
Coventry" of English schools. We have a legal and moral right to 
withdraw our co-operation and society from any one, when to do so is in 
the interest of another. 

In a society which embraces some members of low development, 
force may be an ultimate resort, at least held in reserve as a threat. 
But those members could not complain of compulsion, and would not 
desire to. That is the only argument that the lowest creature can 
understand or use. It is the argument to which we are driven in deal- 
ing with a tiger, and to the tiger's stage of development it is just. 
The Quakers used aggressive force when the Iroquois attacked Phila- 
delphia's environs. The apostle John would have used it, had a dog 
attacked him. 

30 



A Search for Contentment 

One of King Charles's ministers lam- 
pooned him, saying, — 

" Here lies our Sovereign Liege, the King 
Whose word no man relies on, 
Who never said a foolish thing, 
Nor ever did a wise one." 

"Yes," said Charles, "my words are my 
own: my actions are my ministers, " 
Charles chanced upon a great truth. All 
our acts are the acts of others; and all theirs 
are ours. Over our words, we maintain some 
control. We are answerable for them both. 

11 The poor are guilty of the sins of the 
rich ; for the poor are the many, and the rich 
are the few, and the many make the condi- 
tion of which the few are a part" (Sci- 
ence of the Millennium, by S. and M. 
Maybell). 

Yet there should be no quarrel with riches 
as such. Men are entitled to be as rich as 
they can be without robbing their fellows. 
There should be no objection to the com- 
ing billionaire, if he could come with clean 
3i 



Things as They Are 

hands. If men like Edison or Bessemer, 
who save the world millions of miles of 
steps and thousands of years of time, know 
no better reward than money, it seems that 
they should have it. If a man saves ten 
hours of my time, I am willing to give him 
one, or, if he makes two dollars for me, I 
am glad that he should have a dollar. 

Under free conditions a man with a mill- 
ion dollars could do no more harm than a 
man with a million hats. 

But, unhappily, the great fortunes of the 
present day, like nearly all the small ones, 
are based upon monopolies, mainly pat- 
ent, banking, tariff, and especially land, as 
is shown in the New York Tribune s list of 
four thousand American millionaires. Edi- 
son's wealth, for instance, is based partly 
on patent monopoly, but mainly on tele- 
phone franchises. "Scratch a Russian, and 
you find a Tartar. " "Scratch a millionaire, 
and you find a monopolist, " — a monopolist 
created by "our" laws. 

There are not many of us that could, 
32 



A Search for Contentment 

single-handed, change a government, or pre- 
vent or bring on a war. Yet where govern- 
mental action is taken which results in de- 
liverance or in death, whether of Cubans or 
Spaniards or Filipinos, it is your action and 
mine. You and I, as part doers of it, are 
partakers in the common wrong, even though 
we are only passive in the matter, and the 
blood of the victims is on our hands. And 
in evil and suffering this blood will be re- 
quired at our hands. 

In his famous letter to the mayor of At- 
lanta, General Sherman said: — 

4 'War is hell. You brought on the war, 
and you must endure its horrors until it is 
ended. " If the mayor had answered, "I am 
but one, I did nothing in my own person to 
bring on the war," he would not in the least 
have weakened Sherman's argument. Even 
could he have said, "I protested against this 
war, I left no stone unturned to keep it 
off," he would only have relieved himself 
of moral responsibility. Not the less, as 
a part, even if an involuntary part, of the 

33 



Things as They Are 

Southern Confederacy, he would be held to 
be a necessary participant in its hardships, 
and would feel himself that he should blush 
for, or glory in, the action of his State. So 
we participate in the crimes of society and 
in their consequence. 

For, by his very nature, man cannot be 
alone. Our necessary association is the 
basis of progress : a solitary man could never 
rise to be more than a savage man, a brutish 
man. By association we develop helpful- 
ness, sympathy, and love. 

We find that this development is not an 
accident or a series of coincidences, and we 
therefore recognize that there is some kind 
of order in nature and in the universe; that 
some Principle has made man, for whom it 
is not good to be alone, suited to associate 
with his fellows; and that the same orderly 
Principle rules in ourselves. This associa- 
tion is a part of our nature, and from it 
there is no escape. It is neither good nor 
possible that man should be alone: he can- 
not be alone. "None of us liveth to him- 
self, and no man dieth to himself. " 
34 



III. OUR TRIPLEX NATURE. 

Three sides to our nature. — Sense a simple 
one, easily satisfied, easily excusable. — Men- 
tal development complicates, spiritual progress 
adds to difficulties ; later clears all. — Realises 
universal harmony. — Self-control follows, and, 
afterwards, internal peace. 



35 



III. 
Our Triplex Nature. 

There are three sides, or stages, to our 
nature, — animal, mental, and spiritual; 
they are several, like the sides of a triangle, 
— though in the perfectly rounded man or 
woman it is not possible to say where one 
side ends or the other begins. It is not 
necessary to assume that one has a separate 
body, mind, spirit, any more than to say 
that a man has in him a separate child, boy, 
and man. Through the three stages, in their 
order, every one sooner or later must pass, 
learning thereby to understand life; just as 
every one must pass through childhood, 
youth, and maturity. 

The animal nature begins when life is 
conscious of itself. It is that which is 
affected merely through the five senses, 
which are all forms of touch, — tasting, 
smelling, hearing, seeing, and feeling. 
These may be highly cultivated in man or in 
beast. A beast spends its life in gratifying 
37 



Things as They Are 

them, having nothing to consider but its 
animal nature, and it lives a reasonable and 
satisfactory life in doing so. 

Men of animal natures act likewise, and 
by so doing get the best and highest happi- 
ness of which they are capable, which is 
physical comfort and enjoyment. These 
are "the wicked " whose condition troubled 
Job and David so much; whose "eyes stand 
out with fatness," and whose "cow casteth 
not her calf" (Ps. lxxiii. 7; Job xxi. 10). 
David comforted himself with the thought 
that woe awaits them in the future. He 
certainly hoped so. In truth, they are 
but like young bears, with all their troubles 
and experiences before them. They have 
but one master to serve, the flesh; and, act- 
ing according to their simple natures, the 
way seems clear to them. As Charlotte 
Perkins Stetson says, "A cat can hold only 
a cat-full"; and when it gets that, no mat- 
ter how, it is a happy cat. It is impossible 
to be angry with such persons when their 
condition is recognised. Therefore, it is 
38 



Our Triplex Nature 

only in a relative sense that we can say of a 
cat that its nature is good or bad. 

A "good" action, as Mr. Spencer ob- 
serves {Data of Ethics), is one adapted to 
the end desired, as a "good" stroke at 
billiards is one which scores a point; and 
a "good" shot, one which kills the man at 
whom it is aimed. Therefore, when a cat 
finds another mate, or a dog worries the cat, 
or a merchant drives a hard bargain, that is 
a good act, from the point of view of the 
animal. It is only as each reaches higher 
aims, that action changes its character and 
rouses indignation or esteem. 

To dislike or to be angry with any one is 
simply not to understand him. We know 
that cats are sly and cruel, yet no one hates 
a cat. We understand that such is its nat- 
ure; and, seeing that circumstances made it 
so, we harbour no malice toward the beast. 
At the worst, transgressors are only astray ; 
and, as Epictetus says, "Guides should not 
be angry with those who lose their way. " 

We would feel the same to our undeveloped 
39 



Things as They Are 

man, whom we call "wicked, " as we do to 
the cat, if we knew what influence, heredity, 
and circumstances, made him as he is. While 
striving to better him, we would say, "For 
the kind of man that he is, he is just the 
kind of man he ought to be, though it is a 
pretty crude kind. n 

We all recognise the standard of each 
individual, as we excuse bad manners or bad 
morals by the reflection, "He knows no 
better' ' or "She did the best she knew." 
How, then, are the persons blamable for 
not doing better? Yet the errors which 
seem most ridiculous or contemptible are 
usually those which the perpetrator had no 
sufficient means of avoiding. These make 
us feel pleasantly superior because we had 
such means. 

We know, did we but think, that all 
beings, whatever they do, are only acting 
out their nature. So acting it out, so long as 
they do not realise that there is any life 
higher than their own, whatever happens to 
them seems a natural part of all life, as 
40 



. 



Our Triplex Nature 

change seemed to the heathen philosopher, 
who, when he was told of the death of his 
son, replied, "I never supposed that I had 
begotten an immortal. " Hence certain 
schools of "philosophy " — notably, the 
Epicureans — have taught that the highest 
good for man is to gratify his senses, and, 
later, that by "cultivating ourselves, " so as 
to have many wants, and then gratifying 
them, we reach "the highest exercise of our 
faculties," and in this find happiness. 

As a mere animal, man is, on the whole, 
in harmony with natural laws, and has ani- 
mal happiness. But, as soon as the mind 
awakes, he begins to be dissatisfied, he 
comes into new conditions to which he is 
not adapted; and, as soon as the soul is 
quickened and the throes of the birth of the 
spirit begin, he is in more misery. He 
feels desires which he does not know how to 
gratify. He feels new natures, the mental 
and the spiritual, neither of which he can 
satisfy. 

As Tolstoy says: "As soon as the mental 
41 



Things as They Are 

part of a person takes control, new worlds 
are opened, and desires are multiplied a 
thousand-fold. They become as numerous 
as the radii of a circle; and the mind, with 
care and anxiety, sets itself first to cultivate 
and then to gratify these desires, thinking 
that happiness is to be had in that way." 
The body becomes exhausted in the effort to 
keep up with the needless and unlimited 
demands which the mental development has 
opened up. Persons that have attained only 
to the mental development submit every- 
thing to the test of reason, which is correct ; 
but there they stop, not recognising that there 
is any other or higher stage of being than 
their own. Persons in this condition usu- 
ally think the world an evil one, since they 
do not understand how there can be any 
peace in it. The nerves become worn and 
wearied with the constant transmission of 
mere emotion, so that nervous prostration 
often becomes a chronic disease. 

What we call "altruism, " the preference 
by an act of will of the happiness of others 
42 



Our Triplex Nature 

to our own, is the highest product of the 
mental side of our nature. It begins when 
we see and realise that we are brethren, or 
when a long experience of the race has 
ground into us that the suffering of others 
will certainly act and react, directly or in- 
directly, upon ourselves. Then we under- 
stand what misery is and the hopelessness 
of any individual escape from it except 
through the escape of all. But this is not 
full spiritual development : it is only the 
unbearable state which precedes that spirit- 
ual development that will recognise the 
good in all things. Being only a part, it 
cannot comprehend the whole development. 
In the last stage of the three, as selfish- 
ness disappears, the spiritual man feels that 
he is spirit, and, as such, is in accord with 
all spirit and with the productions of spirit; 
that is, with all material things. Spirit 
understands the universe, as we understand 
steam, and can therefore use and control it 
as we use and control steam. Thus, be- 
coming part^of the ruling element, man has 
command over everything that is. 

43 



Things as They Are 

Until he reaches the spiritual stage, how- 
ever, man is like the elephant, whose strength 
giants could not resist, but which, because 
he does not know this, is subject to a little 
child and frightened by a fluttering rag. In 
the spiritual stage a man sees things com- 
prehensively and acts accordingly, and his 
spiritual perceptions are in harmony with 
reason. He realises that he is a necessary 
and proper part of the whole, and sees that 
his greatest good must come from the great- 
est good of the whole, not from the ascen- 
dency of any part of himself or of the uni- 
verse; but that the animal, mental, and 
spirit natures are one, and are one with the 
universe, because a part of the universal 
Spirit. 

The mind is superior in its nature to the 
body, and we are beginning to realise how 
it can extend its control over the body. It 
acts through the nerves, and includes them 
in this control. But what controls the 
mind? Is it not the nature which is higher 
still, the spirit? 

44 



Our Triplex Nature 

We recognise two kinds of self-control : 
physical, — that by which, for instance, a 
man suppresses a start as a cannon is fired ; 
or a woman forbears to scream as a wasp 
lights on her face: mental, — that by which 
a merchant, when he goes home, can put 
away from his thoughts the notes which 
come due to-morrow: or, in its higher form, 
— that by which one can "deny himself, " 
refusing, for instance, to prefer the interests 
of his children to the claims of larger hu- 
manity. 

When hate is put away from us, it may 
be either by mental or by spiritual con- 
trol, according to the motive. If the 
man does it, because he knows it is for his 
own happiness, as mental science shows him 
how to do, that is mental self-control. 
If it is put away because the heart fills 
with love, that is spiritual control. That 
is the larger life, the perfect love, in which 
the man as an individual, a part, is ab- 
sorbed and ceases to be able any longer to 
act selfishly; but is forced to act for all 
45 



Things as They Are 

humanity, regardless of how the action may 
appear to others. A fully developed spirit- 
ual man ceases to act for his own ends as 
an individual : he is acted upon, divine 
action is through him. 

There is nothing incomprehensible or 
needing special intellectual perceptions in 
all this. Any one who can put what is said 
here into his own words will say at once, 
"There is nothing strange about that: it is 
just what every one knows of himself. "* 
This is one* of the tests of truth. 

* The mental, or reflective, part of the man has its special function in 
guiding the intuitional part, which seems to be a phase of the " occult," 
or sub-conscious, mind. When the reasoning faculty is in sole control, 
we have a materialist, a man devoid of perceptions other than those of 
the senses and of reason. When the intuitional, or sub-conscious, mind 
is in sole control, unrestrained by reason, we have a lunatic or else a 
" medium," ill adapted to anything except that special function. 

Is it not because lunacy is produced by the breaking away of the rest 
of the nature from that which operates through the senses, that manual, 
and especially agricultural, occupations are found so efficacious in the 
treatment of lunatics ? (See an interesting discussion of this relation in 
Hudson's Law of Psychic Phenomena.) 



4 6 



IV. THE LAW IN OURSELVES. 

The seardi for happiness from circumstances, 
"the mania for owning things" from intellect. 
— Love alone satisfactory ', meaning universal 
love. — The growth of altruism ; altruism and 
sclfseeki7ig the same tiling. — The recognition 
of brotherhood : drives out hate. — st Tout com- 
prcndre est tout pardonner." — Love, not duty, 
the guide. — No moral character in actions. — 
Follozving convictions leads to light. — Shozvs 
suffering as consequences of error.-*— Artificial 
morality, the sin of the church. — True 
morality. 



47 



IV. 
The Law in Ourselves. 

Happiness is not to be had by gratification 
of the animal nature, nor by material things, 
however pleasant these may seem to be. In- 
deed, any one who intelligently considers 
the accompaniments of a rich life will ques- 
tion whether they bring, on the average, 
more pleasure than annoyance. Horses, for 
instance, are very desirable; but to keep 
one horse is as much trouble as to keep a 
boarder^ and no one is ever satisfied with it, 
while to run a stable takes as much time as 
to run a hotel. If you have so much money 
that you can carelessly turn affairs over to 
servants, then you feel that you are robbed at 
every turn, and that you are surrounded by 
a set of mercenaries whom you support ; so 
that, as a wealthy woman said, "I am the 
keeper of an Irish boarding-house. V 

The more possessions one has, the more 
care one has. The more one has, the 
greater are the efforts of others to get part 

49 



Things as They Are 

of it away for themselves. So that very 
wealthy persons live in open or secret fear 
of their very lives, and feel that they have 
hardly any friends on whom they can count ; 
that their children covet their wealth, and 
are waiting for their deaths ; and that even 
their lovers come wooing the money. A 
man gets money: then in order to "enjoy 
it, " he must spend it. He buys lots of 
things for which he has no real need. Next 
he must have a big house to put them in, 
and must entertain, to show the house. 
Troops of servants must be had to take care 
of the things and of the guests. The ser- 
vants themselves must be looked after; and 
affairs multiply till the man's, and espe- 
cially the woman's, life is entirely taken up 
with looking after the complicated require- 
ments of an unnecessary way of living. 
This we call "maintaining our position in 
society." Truly, it reminds one of Alice's 
position in Through the Looking-glass, 
where every one had to run as hard as he 
could in order to stay where he was. 

50 



The Law in Ourselves 

Even intellectual pursuits, unless they be 
intended for the good of others, come to be 
recognised as objectless; and, however we 
increase pleasures or amusements, there 
comes a time when they end in emptiness 
and satiety. In the mean time all of these 
things exclude the opportunity and often the 
possibility of understanding the best of any 
one, and therefore of loving any one. 

Yet there is nothing worth having but 
love; not alone giving the "love" of 
which we are accustomed to think, which is 
usually little more than a preference for 
things or persons which minister to our com- 
fort or happiness more than others do ; but 
also the love that is an all-embracing 
sense of unity with every one and every 
thing, which comes to the poet and to the 
saint; that is, to really conscious persons. 

Love is that sympathy which makes us 
feel that the universe is a part of ourselves. 
We can neither be afraid nor jealous of those 
whose interests and being are the same as 
our own. Therefore, "perfect love casteth 
out fear. ' ' 

5i 



Things as They Are 

From the selfish love springs "duty, "- 
the obligation that we feel to further the 
well-being of ourselves or of others. This 
becomes an infectious race-feeling, though 
it is often so perverted that we see in it 
nothing but a fear of the natural penalties 
for the violation of law, which are conse- 
quences, or of artificial penalties, which are 
punishments. So derived, it is evident why 
the sense of "duty" is a moral and a virile 
trait, but not a spiritual one. When unself- 
ish love is born, the sense of duty dies. It 
is no longer needed.* 

The savage, a mere brute, cares for no 
one but himself: he will destroy the life of 
any one, in order to enlarge his own. In 
a higher order, man begins to have some 
care for his offspring and afterward for 

*Duty rises, at first, a gloomy tyranny, out of man's helplessness, 
his self-mistrust, in a word, his abstract fear. He personifies all that he 
abstractly fears as God, and straightway becomes the slave of his duty to 
God. He imposes that slavery fiercely on his children, threatening 
them with hell, and punishing them for their attempts to be happy. 
When, becoming bolder, he ceases to fear everything and dares to love 
something, this duty of his to what he fears evolves into a sense of duty 
to what he loves. Sometimes he again personifies what he loves as 
God, and the God of Wrath becomes the God of Love ; sometim.es he 

52 



- 



The Law in Ourselves 

his wife. With the advance of moral edu- 
cation, he comes to care for his whole 
family; and, as growth goes on, his care 
includes the tribe. Still later his affections 
go out to his State, as was common in 
America before the Civil War. Now the 
wider-minded, larger-hearted men begin to 
care for the nation; and indications are not 
lacking that this extended family feeling, 
which we call "patriotism," will embrace 
all English-speaking peoples, a,nd, perhaps, 
eventually, all humanity, and even the whole 
creation. Then we shall see, and' later we 
shall feel, that all war is civil war. 

Now why does the savage begin to care 
for the members of his immediate family, as 
well as for himself, and sometimes even in 

at once becomes a humanitarian, an altruist, acknowledging only his 
duty to his neighbor. This stage is correlative to the rationalistic stage 
in the evolution of philosophy and the capitalist phase in the evolution 
of industry. But in it the emancipated slave of God falls under the 
dominion of society, which, having just reached a phase in which all 
love is ground out of it by the competitive struggle for money, remorse- 
lessly crushes him, until, in due course of the further growth of his spirit 
or will, a sense at last arises in him of his duty to himself. And when 
this sense is fully grown, which it hardly is yet, the tyranny of duty is 
broken, for now the man's God is himself; and he, self-satisfied at last, 
ceases to be selfish." — Bernard Shaw. 

53 



Things as They Are 

preference to himself? Why do we feel a 
sympathy with the Armenian Christians ? 
Is it not fellow-feeling in both cases? Is 
it not because we recognise that the Ar- 
menians are part of ourselves, that they 
and we have a common origin and similar 
feelings, that they are our kind, that they are, 
in short, our "brothers? " That is "kind " 
love : it is simply extended and enlightened 
selfishness. The better we know these people 
or know any persons, and understand their 
desires and thoughts and griefs, the more and 
better we love them. 

Surely, it is but a lack of mutual under- 
standing among races which have different 
languages, manners, and desires, that makes 
the Englishman think of "the fickle and 
unreliable Frenchman ;" while the French- 
man, with equal sincerity, speaks of "perftde 
Albion." We distrust the Oriental, think- 
ing that truth is not in him; and he retorts 
in his various tongues by calling us "foreign 
devils." 

When we know and understand all man- 

54 



The Law in Ourselves 

kind, feeling that they also are, not only of 
one flesh, but of one spirit with ourselves, 
shall we not regard them also as of our own 
family, and bestow upon them our enlarged 
and enlightened family affection? The fact 
is that i 'patriotism, " "family affection," 
and "maternal love/' good as they are, so 
far as they go, are nothing but more or less 
extended selfishness. 

The federation of the world, like the fed- 
eration of the family, must be based on 
understanding and on sympathy. The nec- 
essary principle of love is in every one, for 
the most depraved criminal has some one, 
even if it be but his mother, who does care 
for him ; and we can no more love that which 
is not lovable than we can see that which is 
not visible. 

On the lower plane, an understanding of 
our community of interest soon develops this 
sympathy. On the higher, the sympathy is 
developed by working out our nature in our 
acts. 

The early Quakers, who secured for Eng- 

55 



Things as They Are 

lish-speaking people such liberty of speech 
on religious matters as we have, maintained 
that in every individual there is a spark of 
infinite love, which, if attended to, will not 
only show the right course to be pursued; 
but will also lead the animal man in the 
right course as soon as he becomes sure that 
he cannot walk in it by mere will. They 
had no creed or set of principles to be ad- 
hered to, as such, by any exercise of will. 
To illustrate; some busybody told George 
Fox that William Penn was wearing a sword, 
expecting that Fox would immediately accuse 
Penn of inconsistency, as it was generally 
held to be a tenet of the Quakers that they 
should not fight. But Fox said, "Let him 
wear it, as long as he can, " knowing that, 
if Penn was conscious of the infinite love 
within him, there would come a time when 
the sword would be laid aside naturally, not 
torn from his side by law or by his disbelief 
in fighting, but because he had no use for it, 
the spirit of anger having vanished. For, 
if any one, being full of anger, refrained 
56 



The Law in Ourselves 

from fighting, he was from the Quaker 
standpoint, acting the hypocrite, and was a 
mere professor. But, if he let out his 
anger, being at the time desirous of love, he 
would be so humiliated that his whole being 
would yearn to be again in accord with the 
law of love, and his anger would cause a 
revulsion; would be changed into love, so 
that it would be impossible for him again 
to fall away. It is only on plucking the 
apples of Sodom, that men who desir 
them can learn that they are filled with 
ashes. These Quakers held that, if they 
desired to do an evil thing, it was as bad 
as if they did it : the anger had to be 
transmuted into affection by the alchemy of 
the spirit. In other words, they thought 
that one must be loving, as well as speak 
and act lovingly. 

If I so much as curse in my heart the fly 
that bothers me, or the man who may have 
ruined my life, the kingdom is not in me. I 
am as one who has said to his brother, "Thou 
fool!" and 

57 



Things as They Are 

" He that shuts love out, in turn shall be 
By love shut out, and at her threshold lie 
Howling in utter darkness." 

The greatest evil that the churches have 
done, far outweighing the persecutions that 
the Church, like every other party in power, 
has committed, is the teaching that acts can 
be divided into "wicked"* and "meritori- 
ous " ; that the "wicked " arts can be expi- 
ated by penance, and that the "merit " will 
be rewarded in a world to come. Actions 
have what we regard as moral character, but 
only as they are the expression of feelings 
of love or of hate. 

It is only by working out our nature ac- 
cording to the circumstances to which, with 
our knowledge, we are subject, that we ever 
learn any better way, or even that there is 
a better way. Therefore, when we refrain 
from doing something which we wish to do, 

* Professor Albert R. Parsons says that "wicked" in King James's 
version is generally a mistranslation for violent, proud, or such words. 
It was just at the time that candles were introduced in England, and the 
translators made an adjective from the word "wick," the thing sure to 
be burnt. 

58 



The Law in Ourselves 

let us not on that account credit ourselves 
with virtue. It is merely a piece of expedi- 
ency on our part, which may or may not be 
wise. If I tear up an ugly letter which I 
have written, that is a ' 'moral' ' act; but I 
tear it up because, weighing all considera- 
tions, I do not really wish to send it. The 
evil is in us so long as we desire evil, 
and, notwithstanding our resistance, will, in 
some form, work itself out in us. The most 
we can get from our refusal to put it in prac- 
tice is a strengthening of our will. Until 
we see that evil-doing is not a good to us, 
and until we have such a dislike to it as we 
would have to drinking a glass of stagnant 
water, however nicely sweetened and spiced 
it might be, we might as well do the evil, 
and be done with it. We will be the sooner 
done with it, because of the sense of degra- 
dation and disgust which it will produce. 

We can grow only by actually doing what 
seems to us at any stage to be right, how- 
ever mistaken we may be. By carrying out 
the relative right, that which is right for us, 

59 



Things as They Are 

we come to understand what is absolutely 
right. 

" The song is to the singer, and comes back most to 

him ; 
The theft is to the thief, and comes back most to 

him ; 
The love is to the lover, and comes back most to 

him ; 
The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to 

him — it cannot fail. 

And no man understands any greatness or goodness 
but his own, or the indication of his own." 

Walt Whitman. 

So Americans are learning, slowly, but 
learning by hard times, that efforts to make 
' 'foreigners " pay our taxes are as disastrous 
as they are unjust; while many Englishmen 
of this generation, who have not tried it, 
are selfishly hankering after ' ' protection. " 
In the same way, a hundred years ago, every 
one believed that war meant " high prices 
and good times. " After the war of the 
secession, we found that war meant high 
09 



The Law in Ourselves 

taxes and suffering, as well as oppression. 
Yet the most of our generation have to learn 
it once more, though many now know its 
evils without having to try it again. Had 
the nation been forcibly restrained from 
fighting, or found no one to fight, it would 
still think that all that was needed for 
felicity on earth was to get a chance to kill 
weaker strangers. Some time mankind will 
find out that all war is war upon itself. 

If, therefore, the nation is persuaded by 
its sympathies and by those who have an 
interest in war that it ought to fight, its 
best course is to fight, and thereby to learn 
the folly of fighting. 

Our growth is like coming out of a cave. 
We have a certain amount of light. If we 
refuse to follow it, we shall wander farther 
into the depths. If we follow it, we shall 
get more light, until we reach the perfect 
day. 

To follow a code of morals, and therefore 
do something which is repugnant to us, is 
just as likely to result in further demorali- 

6i 



Things as They Are 

sation, as in moral advance. When the 
Indian tortures himself, or the hangman exe- 
cutes the sentence upon his prisoner, each 
because he "ought to," each is brutalised, 
and, just to the extent of his act, loses kind- 
liness for others. And, if we give charity 
because "we ought to," we simply harden 
our own hearts and darken our own eyes. 

Help your friends, those whom you love 
or that you feel, have claims upon you. 
Your happiness is in that, if you did but 
know it. If you, in truth, help yourself at 
every step of your development, you cannot 
fail thereby most effectually to help the 
universe. Soon you will grow till you will 
feel that all men whom you can help are 
friends. Then you will desire to help all 
men, and will have answered for yourself the 
puzzling question, "Who is my neighbour? " 



62 



V. THE WORLD'S PAIN. 

"Religion M implies right practice and the throes 
of rebirth. — Education painful. — Growth of 
religion. — At war with evil. — The new cre- 
ation evolves happiness , notwithstanding strug- 
gle. — Participants in evil, protest alone avail- 
able. — Unavoidable share in social oppression. 
— We must admit guilt. — Herron on our 
share. — Necessary in nature of things. — In- 
dividual goodness impossible. — Effect on 
health. — Not a question of will. 



63 



V. 

The World's Pain. 

The realisation of man's spiritual nature 
is what we call religion, always perfect 
in its essence, always, as yet, imperfect 
in its degree. Religion is the ' 'binding 
together' ' of our nature with the nature 
of the universe. It consists in conformity 
to wise law; that is, to Justice. This re- 
ligion is practical : it means righteousness 
in ourselves. But, as soon as we have the 
righteousness, we are forced to begin to cre- 
ate for others, in a half-baked world, that 
kingdom of heaven w r hich brings to our- 
selves a calm which outward things can 
neither make nor break. In so trying to 
externalise the kingdom, we further exem- 
plify the law under which we learned. 
Creation, the new birth, which we call de- 
velopment, is going on in ourselves; and we 
begin to join in like creation of others, by 
aiding their development; for "I, if I be 
lifted up, will draw all men unto me." As 

65 



Things as They Are 

soon as we are freed from agony by recog- 
nising the lack of harmony that causes agony, 
we strive to show the cause to others ; for we 
cannot take the promised land alone. 

In such striving to remove this source of 
pain, for the good of others, and not in 
thinking of ourselves, true happiness is 
found. It is spiritual peace and joy and 
love, such as a mere animal cannot desire 
or even understand.* 

When, then, however slightly, justice, the 
perfect law, has been realised in our hearts, 
we can try to practise it in the world. 

To do this involves us at once in further 
and fiercer war, for we cannot do justice 
individually or alone. Though individuals, 
we are a part of a social whole, a community ; 
and what, as a community, we sow, that, as 
a community, we must also reap. 

As members of one body, we are forced to 
take our part in the sowing as well as in the 
reaping; but not to take part in it silently. 

*This is the message of Tolstoy in his difficult book on Life, 
done into intelligible speech in Even as You and 7, by the author of 
these letters. 

66 



The World's Pain 

In our words and in our lives we must 
protest, showing clearly that we are not 
willing parties to the evil which we share. 
But, unlike the Pharisee, we must always 
openly acknowledge that, so long as we live 
upon the labor of others, in action we are 
wrong-doers. We cannot live in a com- 
munity without conforming in action to its 
ways. 

As the children's song says, "You're a 
rogue, and I'm another." We do not de- 
sire to be so, probably nobody does; but 
we are. And, when we realise that we are 
sinners ourselves, it is easy to be a friend of 
sinners. 

Suppose we serve ourselves, or an em- 
ployer, or our country so well that we do 
the work of three men. Then we are most 
dangerous competitors. We take the places 
of three men, increase the standard of the 
amount of labour required of each worker, and 
make the struggle for a living harder for some. 
This is the result of our superior skill or 
strength. We may mean well, but, under 
67 



Things as They Are 

present conditions, we plunder some one of 
part of his livelihood. 

The extortioner and the oppressor are re- 
sponsible for only part of the injustice they 
commit, for they could do nothing without 
persons who submit to them. You and I 
submit, even if unwillingly. If the army 
retreats, you and I, as private soldiers, must 
retreat with it. Yet it is you and I who 
retreat; and we shall be reproached for it, 
and shall feel that we are justly disgraced. 
As Professor George D. Herron says : — 

"However hard or devoutly our wills be 
set against it, so long as the system exists, 
we are all competitors in some degree. All 
of us who live in any measure of comfort live 
more or less by economic stealing, no mat- 
ter what our occupations or intentions. Our 
comforts are bought with the poverty, and 
even the lives, of beaten men and women. 

44 It is practically true, and ought to be 

true, that none of us can extricate ourselves 

from the social disgrace and pain until the 

whole social life is extricated. We cannot 

68 



The Worlds Pain 

sleep, eat, wear clothes, travel, educate our- 
selves, read books, attend public worship, 
without participating in the social wrong 
and bearing the social guilt. But, withal, 
we need not continue in the sin of the sys- 
tem under the delusion that grace may 
thereby abound. There is a divine, as well 
as a devilish, complicity in evil. We may be 
in, though we are not of, organised wrong. 
We may war and sacrifice against the com- 
petition that besets us, participating in it 
only for its overthrow and the social rescue. 
We may confess our part in the social steal- 
ing, and partake of it, only to expose it for 
the social deliverance. We may help the 
prosperous to understand how the system 
makes them social thieves, in spite of them- 
selves; pious, maybe, and honourable, but 
none the less thieves, to be brought to judg- 
ment with the system. ' ' 

Reverend Charles E. Garst said, " Indi- 
vidual purity in the midst of social impu- 
rity is much like household purity in a great 
city without a sewer system. " 
69 



Things as They Are 

We can no more keep what we have than 
we can "make a living" without taking 
advantage of the system of society, founded, 
as it is, on injustice. Every one knows 
that, if he is in business, he prospers only 
by taking trade from some one else; and 
that, if he is not in business, he lives as di- 
rectly upon others as if he ate their flesh. 
It will not suffice to "try to be just." 
Who of us can be just? 

But, could we refrain from every deceit, 
still we would not be just. Under our sys- 
tem, even a day labourer who does two dol- 
lars' worth of useful work for one dollar, gets 
the job and the dollar at the expense of leav- 
ing some one else "out of work." To be 
just is to deprive no one of his earnings, 
not to live at the expense of others, not to 
have 'share or benefit of interest, rent, or 
taxes, all of which are the product of the 
labour of others. Justice, like purity in pol- 
itics, or anywhere else is, indeed, under 
present conditions "an iridescent dream." 

To be "sincerely but imperfectly" just! 
70 



The World's Pain 

Why, sincere but imperfect truth is untruth. 
Sincere but imperfect justice is injustice. 
Even by our own standards ' 'there is none 
righteous, — no, not one. ■' You say, "May 
I not go my way, harming no one? " You 
might if you could; but, only when equal 
freedom is attained, will this be possible. 
Monopoly has closed the doors, and made 
you as one in a crowded hall when there is 
an alarm of fire. You cannot "go your 
way" except over the bodies of your fellows, 
children and women and men. 

In writing this, I am using an oil lamp, 
and thereby adding to the power of the 
Standard Oil monopoly. The unbearable 
iniquity in which that power is used will be 
understood by any one who will read 
Henry D. Lloyd's Wealth against Com- 
mojiwealth. 

The paper on which I write paid a profit 
to the paper trust, and the book reached you 
loaded with inflated charges of transporta- 
tion companies. Each of these corpora- 
tions, to which you and I have contributed, 
7i 



Things as They Are 

has the power, and uses it, to deprive men 
of liberty and of freedom to do right; forces 
them into various deceptions, oppressions, 
and frauds, in order to advance its interests 
and to retain their situations. 

So we are compelled, and assist in com- 
pelling each other, to live in a state of war. 

This condition of things affects physical 
health. And depression and disease are in- 
fectious, like good spirits and health. As 
says Dr. E. H. Pratt: — 

"There is no condition of health or dis- 
ease in which the element of fear does not 
do serious mischief. Let suggestion be 
aimed at it until every vestige of it is de- 
stroyed. There is no condition of health or 
disease in which jealousy is not harmful. 
Let it be suggested out of existence by all 
means as speedily as possible. There is no 
condition of health or disease to which 
greed is not so extremely detrimental that 
it deserves the earnest consideration of all 
healers. It is a common as well as grievous 
fault. There is no condition of health 
72 



The World's Pain 

or disease in which sensuality in all 
its types is not only disgraceful, but also 
disastrous. Suggestive therapeutics is es- 
pecially fitted to cope with it, and a warfare 
of extermination should be at once inaugu- 
rated. There is no condition of health or 
disease in which hatred is not a dangerous 
attribute. Let it be marked by psychic spe- 
cialists for complete extinction. There is 
no condition of health or disease that worry 
does not disturb and damage. Let whole- 
some thought currents be directed against it 
until it is annihilated. Let mental healers 
attack insincerity, distrust, infidelity, scep- 
ticism, and ignorance, and all errors of the 
heart and mistakes of the head, until every 
thrill of selfishness is extracted from the 
hearts, and every false thought or sugges- 
tion is swept from the brains of men." 

But love is a better disinfectant than sug- 
gestion. So that often, when one says of a 
child that it is cross because it is not very 
well, it would be more correct to say that it 
is not very well because it is cross. In fact, 
73 



Things as They Are 

we do sometimes say this in concrete form, 
when we attribute a fit of indigestion or 
headache to passion or to worry. Is it rea- 
sonable to confine these conclusions to our 
children or to our neighbours? Are not you 
and I also of the same nature ? May not, 
then, habitual nervous depression or chronic 
debility be due, at least in part, to habitual 
harshness or to chronic self-seeking? 

That we do not desire to be or to do evil 
does not release us from taking part in it, 
nor from the effects of it. It is doubtful 
if any one desires to be bad, but circum- 
stances compel or induce many to do 
wrong. The results to those who suffer 
from the wrong are the same whether it is 
done willingly or not. When the ship- 
wrecked sailor eats his comrade, or when 
you take trade from your competitor, the 
fact that you did not wish to injure him, 
but merely to save yourself, does not help 
the victim in the least. As to yourself, it 
makes the greatest difference. 

If you are a humane man, this method of 

74 



The World's Pain 

living will be so distasteful to you that you 
will not and cannot be silent. You must 
express your disgust, even if only by doing 
the wrong in such a way as to explain and 
emphasise its true character and results. 
The better nature in you will protest; and, 
to the extent that the protest is heard 
by others, that higher nature will be 
crucified. This is "to be done day by day, 
with evil, and to live to righteousness. " It 
is possible in its perfection only when we 
live among the righteous. 

So long as the evil conditions remain 
about us, to do as little of the conventional 
evil as possible, or to do the evil tenderly, 
will not tend to help moral progress. The 
real sustainers of American chattel slavery, 
those who kept it so long in being, were not 
the brutal Legrees, but the kind St. Claires 
and the testamentary emancipators, like 
Jefferson, whose use of the "peculiar insti- 
tution " made slavery defensible. Just so it 
is the "charitable M and the "philanthropic " 
that palliate the horrors of our industrial war, 
75 



Things as They Are 

and the "red cross" and the "civilizers " 
that palliate the horrors of our national 
war. All of these cover brutality from our 
sight, and so prevent its abolition. 



76 



VI. THE DELIVERANCE FROM 
BONDAGE. 

Suffering a part of oar school course. — Not 
to be relieved by force. — The divine end and 
means and method. — Development hindered 
by outside interference. — Compelling children 
to be "good." — Experience of ill teaches self- 
restraint. — The chat ity palliative of sufferings 
ineffectual and injurious. — Leave charity to 
the uninitiated. — Its selfishness and stupidity. 

— The temperance palliative. — The advance 
in humanity. — Abandonment of restrictions. 

— The process. — The growing desire for jus- 
tice ; that is, for love. — Trust to the natural 
growth. 



77 



VI. 

The Deliverance from Bond- 
age. 

"No man is wise enough or good enough 
to govern another ; ' ' yet, the wronger and 
more narrow-minded men are, the more de- 
termined they are to force others to walk 
in their ways. 

As we become more enlightened, we cease 
to despise or hate those who do not like, nor 
even see, what we admire. '"A liberal edu- 
cation ' ' is one which makes us liberal; 
that is, free as to our minds. 

Perhaps, when we become as wise as gods, 
we shall cease to make laws at all, and leave, 
as God does, every one to the natural and 
inevitable consequences of his own deeds. 

Suffering teaches the sufferer the effects 
of actions : our efforts to relieve it teach 
us the causes of the suffering. 

To one who understands that suffering is 
not an accident, but a consequence, the Call 

79 



Things as They Are 

is to show the sufferers its origin and to 
teach them to avoid that, whether caused by 
themselves or by others. They must suffer 
and suffer, in spite of, and even because of, 
all we can do, until they and we learn the 
causes of suffering. When they and we 
learn its causes, and set ourselves to remov- 
ing them, the suffering becomes tolerable 
to them and to us. 

We may think, perhaps, that persons have 
no right to bring into the world children for 
whom they cannot provide. To refrain 
from so doing, may cause greater evils; but, 
if we think that is a cause of misery, let 
us tell the people so. We shall get good 
thereby. If that really be a cause, and you 
and I merely relieve the unfortunate chil- 
dren, unless we make the people understand, 
there will be still more destitute children 
in the next generation. But, having shown 
the cause of pain, the proper method is, not 
to alleviate the pain, but to let the wrong- 
doers feel it, till they are desirous of remov- 
ing its cause. Then help them. If, after 
80 



Deliverance from Bondage 

they have recognised the cause, they still 
wish to retain it, let them retain it. By no 
means try to alleviate the pain by making 
laws restraining them by force from the full 
gratification of their desires. 

It has not been found by experience that 
force has prevented wrong. In England, 
when they hung for sheep-stealing, sheep- 
stealing kept increasing. The reverse was 
the case when they ceased. In many cases 
force increases the evil. 

Says Mr. William Alexander Smith : "The 
'evil ' I see in prize fighting is that prize 
fighters, like prostitutes and saloon keepers, 
are the perpetual victims of uniformed black- 
mailers. As in trade and commerce, there 
should be absolutely free competition in 
prize fighting, and that class of sport would 
become a 'drug on the market/ We would 
have Corbett and Fitzsimmons contesting 
for the championship for the pennies we 
would toss to them, as we do to the hurdy- 
gurdy artists." 

Comstock, Gerry & Company should be 
81 



Things as They Are 

urged to carry out what they believe in every 
detail. They will soon find that they cannot 
correct things by force. Indirectly, undoubt- 
edly, they do great good by showing their 
inability to do the good they had in mind, 
which is a false good, a sham, or to do any 
good directly. If they succeeded, it would 
only be in making hypocrites and weaklings. 
They say, in effect, "Poor God, with no one 
to help him rule the world. " They have 
not yet learned, with ^Eschylus, that "the 
gods, for what they care for, care enough. " 
If it is true that men learn by suffering 
for errors, as much as by rejoicing in suc- 
cess, then laws intended to discourage im- 
provident or illegitimate births, or otherwise 
to compel goodness, are little better than 
devices to prevent experience, — plans to 
keep a certain number of spirits from get- 
ting the education which they need. Were 
we to let people alone, whether drunk or 
sober, until they interfere with the liberty 
of another, and to leave drunkenness and the 
sale of liquor entirely unrestricted, the in- 
82 



Deliverance from Bondage 

temperate would soon drink themselves to 
death, and thereby cease to propagate their 
like. This seems harsh. But would it in- 
volve more misery than is implied in end- 
less generations of the weak and imbecile 
half-restrained victims of excess that are 
kept by force from learning that error is 
destruction? "But, if we removed the re- 
strictions which make liquor so dear, your 
poor boy would kill himself with drink' ' ? 
Why should he not kill himself? My 
sorrowful sister, is it not better so than 
that, perhaps, crowds of your descendants 
through him, should fill the brothels and 
the jails? 

When we see a person spending his 
money foolishly, getting drunk, or conduct- 
ing himself in other ways that we think 
wrong, we are inclined to stop him. We 
say, "If I were you, or if I were in your 
place, I would not do so." But, if we had 
the same knowledge and desires as he, we 
would do the same. He is spending his 
money in the way which pleases him. If 
83 



Things as They Are 

he were not allowed to do so, he would feel 
unsatisfied, and would think that satisfaction 
would come only when he would be allowed 
to gratify his appetites. If he so believes, 
he can never find out that it is not true, 
until he tries it. 

In the same way we ourselves have done 
something which has resulted badly. We did 
what we at that time thought would be for 
our welfare. We did what we wished to do. 
If we regret it, we are wasting our senti- 
ment ; for we knew no better then. Now we 
know better, and would not repeat that 
course. 

"Why did I do that? I ought to have 
done otherwise." You are simply putting 
yourself, with your present experience, in 
the place of the person who has not yet got- 
ten it. You are like a child who should 
blame himself because he could not recite 
his lesson before he had read it in the 
school-book. Although you made your free 
choice, as your mind inclined, you did not 
then know enough to refrain : you know now. 
84 



Deliverance from Bondage 

If you call yourself a fool, it shows only that 
you are still much of a fool. We should not, 
then, subject others to restraint from with- 
out, for their own benefit or for the benefit 
of others whom we think we shall thereby 
relieve; for that is simply to interrupt the 
lesson. 

It is equally injurious to relieve a man of 
the consequences of his folly, unless they 
have already made him wise. Ross Winans 
said, "I have picked up a great many lame 
ducks in the course of my life, but all of 
them were lamer when I put them down, 
than when I took them up. " If a man 
came to me with the gout, do you think I 
would heal him? Not at all. I would 
show him that he ate too much and worked 
too little, and that, as long as he lives that 
way, he "has a right" to have the gout. 
This is not a recipe, but a principle, and 
applies to all the relations of men and 
women and children, though, because chil- 
dren are helpless, we hardly yet admit that 
they have any rights. But they have. 

85 



Things as They Are 

When you see a furious man beating his 
horse, you do not inquire whether the horse 
was naughty or not. You say, "That is 
brutal, " and threaten to report him for 
cruelty to animals. Your children, how- 
ever, are beaten at home by angry parents ; 
and it is not reported. Nobody calls it 
"assault and battery. " No. You and I 
tell the children, "whose angels do always 
behold the face of their Father which is 
in heaven," that they are wicked, and that 
God will punish them. Then, lest God 
should make some mistake, we punish them 
ourselves. 

Consider what an arrogation of divine 
wisdom and denial of divine justice it is to 
punish any one. Not even nature attempts to 
graduate the suffering to fit the crime. All 
that she decrees is that the appropriate con- 
sequence shall follow every violation of law. 
And this penalty, and the violation, too, is 
part of the necessary education of the suf- 
ferer and of others. Besides, it is a part of 
law, and happens in accordance with law, 
86 



Deliverance from Bondage 

— law of which we see or understand little 
or nothing, but which exists nevertheless. 

This is as one should expect. If there is 
an order in nature, then we may be sure 
that whatever we do contrary to that order 
will work wrong and cause suffering, both 
for ourselves and others. To deny this, to 
say that the evil tree will bring forth good 
fruit, is an infidelity no less in the eyes of 
the scientist than in those of the devout. 
"I knew," says Ruskin, "that the fool had 
said in his heart, 'there is no God; ' but to 
hear him declare openly with his lips, 'There 
is a foolish god/ was something for which 
my art studies had not prepared me." 

The "divine right M of parents to rule is 
as ridiculous as the "divine right" of 
kings, and much more injurious. The Dec- 
laration of our Independence says that "gov- 
ernments derive their just powers from the 
consent of the governed." Have your chil- 
dren consented that you should be their 
policeman, judge, and jailer every time you 
get into a bad temper? Truly, "ignorance, 
87 



Things as They Are 

neglect, and contempt of human rights" are 
responsible for as much of the miseries of 
childhood as of society. 

"But it is necessary to punish children,' ' 
you say. Necessary, but not right. That is 
equivalent to saying either that there is no 
God or that his law will not work. You 
are not God yourself, and to punish is to 
assume more than divine wisdom ; for there 
are no punishments in the divine order of 
nature, only inevitable consequences. Re- 
member that scarcely omniscience could 
measure out punishment suited exactly to 
the offence. Harmony, consequence, law, 
— that is the message of the Infinite; and 
when you secrete the candy-box, lest the 
child should over-indulge, you deprive him 
of his birthright of opportunity for self- 
restraint. I daily see a child who will play 
with candy all day long and never touch a 
bit, except under her mother's advice. She 
says, "It would not be good for me." She 
has learned that faith that is justified by its 
works. 

88 



Deliverance from Bondage 

The nature of things is a school in which 
one learns to rule his own spirit, to control 
himself. Then are we to counteract the 
discipline of the school? 

Of course, it takes more time and trouble 
to teach children than it does to whack 
them; but have you anything better worth 
the time and trouble — except to go to after- 
noon teas? If you must beat your little 
ones, beat them with a club. That will 
not destroy their self-respect. 

Love, patience, experience, — these, and 
not slippers, are the divine means of teach- 
ing; for bruising can teach a child nothing 
but that you are a bruiser, which he would 
learn soon enough without your pains. But 
your bruising does lead a child to think that, 
if you are not there to punish wrong-doing, 
it will go unpunished, and that whatsoever 
the child soweth, that shall he not also reap, 
but something else, — the only real infi- 
delity. 

But, my lazy, dear friend, the world is so 
made that it really pays to work towards 
89 



Things as They Are 

righteousness. "Godliness is profitable for 
all things/' such is the goodness and the 
severity of eternal law ; and you will be sur- 
prised to find how even the young barbarian, 
whom you have brought forth and developed, 
will respond to kindness. He is not really 
worse than the boys at the Elmira Reforma- 
tory or than Dr. Arnold's Rugby boys. If 
the appeal to reason and righteousness suc- 
ceeds with them, it might with your little 
child; and, if you must treat him as a mere 
animal, it is because you have brought him 
up as a mere brute, and not as a reasonable 
soul. Experience is a severe teacher, but 
there is no other for him or for us. The 
most we can do is to repeat, explain, and 
illustrate her lessons. To constantly stand 
in her way is the only "sparing of the rod " 
that can really spoil the child. 

A baby sat next its father at breakfast as 
soon as it was able to sit up, and was con- 
sumed with a desire to reach the silver 
kettle of hot water. The father carefully 
explained by signs that it would burn. 
90 



Deliverance from Bondage 

Nevertheless, baby sensibly concluded to 
try for itself. All right. — It did burn. 
Papa was wiser than baby thought, and 
could safely be trusted again. Also baby 
could be trusted near the kettle. If the 
child had trusted without trying, it would 
have been a little fool; and, if the father 
had forced it to, he would have been a big 
one. 

If the child has eaten enough, make him 
understand that; and, if he will then eat 
more, let him have indigestion, and let 
him understand the cause and the conse- 
quent discomfort. "But most of the dis- 
comfort and care will fall upon me," you 
say. True; thank goodness for that. We 
can somewhat bear one another's burdens. 
Besides, thereby you may get some of the 
education yourself. 

Your little boy sees you take out a knife, 
curious, shining, and cut a stick in two. 
He feels the faculty in himself also to work 
such miracles as that, if he only had the 
knife. But you tell him not to touch it. 

9i 



Things as They Are 

Being wiser than you, he does touch it. If 
no evil happens, you are convicted of error. 
If he cuts his fingers, does not that hurt? 
Then why do you box his ears? It only 
makes him think you are stupid or revenge- 
ful (he is only a child). Better far to let 
him try, explain to him its dangers, protect 
him in the trial, and, as soon as he has 
learned them, let him have a knife. 

Thereby you have fulfilled the highest 
mission of man. What is the good of you 
and of me except to show the right and warn 
against the wrong? To the extent that we 
do those things, we are the prophets of the 
Lord. " There is one God, and every man 
is his prophet, " joyously, if willingly: 
otherwise, with pain. 

A girl whose education has been by ex- 
perience will not, like nearly all young 
girls, run out in the wet with thin shoes, 
merely because mamma is not there to say 
no; nor will she clandestinely marry a 
good-looking "count. M 

Let your children and your fellows know 
92 



Deliverance from Bondage 

the truth, and they will trust to it and you. 
Appeal always to the divinity in men, and 
not to the beast. If something necessarily 
disagreeable must be done (there are few 
such things), explain the reasons, if you see 
any. Let the pupil know just how much 
pain it may have to undergo, and accustom 
it to "do what is wise." If it sometimes 
refuses to do it, the mischief is less than to 
run the risk of "breaking its will." It 
were as well to break a child's back as 
break its will. Where deadly peril threat- 
ens, do for your child what you ought to do 
for your neighbour. You have no right to 
do more or less. If you see a man igno- 
rantly run in front of the cars, you pull him 
back. If he but goes out in the rain, you 
only warn him. So you may do with your 
child. 

You may advise with your superior intel- 
ligence: you must not substitute your mind 
for another's. You may guide by your 
greater knowledge, but you cannot improve 
nature with a club. Above all things, do 

93 



Things as They Are 

not condemn: ' 'Judge not, that ye be not 
judged/' for your judgment will probably 
be wrong. 

So that force, even with children, does 
little good and much harm, as might be 
expected. "By no process can coercion be 
made equitable. The freest form of govern- 
ment is only the least objectionable form. 
The rule of the many by the few, we call 
tyranny. The rule of the few by the 
many is tyranny also, only of the less in- 
tense kind. " (Herbert Spencer, in Social 
Statics. ) 

Still less can be hoped from the "power 
of money," even if wisely spent, — for in- 
stance, in charity. 

Charity attracts to the cities a large num- 
ber who, if left in the country, would sup- 
port themselves somehow. They come to 
the city, assured that, if they find nothing to 
do, there are at least plenty of places where 
they can get shelter. After the panic of 
1873 the citizens' relief committee appointed 
ex-Mayor Hewitt, Reverend Dr. John Hall, 
94 



Deliverance from Bondage 

and other gentlemen trusted by the public, to 
see what should be done to relieve the dis- 
tress of the city. After a full investigation, 
they decided that the best thing to do was to 
leave the matter alone, because special efforts 
would create as much distress as they re- 
lieved by attracting into the city those who 
might make out a living in the country. 

We have made no progress in the relief of 
poverty for eighteen hundred years : we have 
not fewer paupers, we have not less dis- 
tress. 

Robert Treat Paine says : — 

"In spite of all we do, the great fact 
stares us in the face, that pauperism is 
steadily gaining ground. More paupers 
each year, more money wanted, larger alms- 
houses building or to be built." 

Nor do most of our efforts even tend to 
lessen distress or pauperism. Model tene- 
ment houses increase the crowding about 
them, because, holding fewer tenants than 
the buildings they supplant, they take up as 
much room; and, in addition, their superior 

95 



Things as They Are 

character increases the land value and raises 
rents, by attracting more inhabitants to the 
district. Free or subsidised cheap feeding 
interferes with small restaurants and ca- 
terers, and does not in the long run furnish 
as economical or as good a food supply. But, 
worse than all this, where there are two 
men competing for one job, the man who 
will work the cheapest will get the job, and 
the man who can live the cheapest will work 
the cheapest, so that the more you supply 
charitable "aid of wages," whether by hous- 
ing, feeding, clothing, or even amusing the 
workman, the more you reduce his wages. 
That this factor is indirect makes it none 
the less powerful. We do the same thing 
directly and consciously in our charitable 
institutions by making garments at prices 
with which the independent worker cannot 
possibly compete and live in decency, the 
loss coming out of the pockets of "all such 
as are religiously and devoutly disposed." 
It is sad, but undeniable, that our charities 
are nearly all dastroyers of unselfishness by 
96 



Deliverance from Bondage 

the paid or perfunctory performance of what 
ought to be done directly from love, and are 
besides actual factories of paupers. 

" Whatever exception you may have en- 
countered, you know that the rule is that 
those who receive relief are, or soon become, 
idle, intemperate, untruthful, vicious, or at 
least quite shiftless and improvident. You 
know that the more relief they have, as a 
rule, the more they need. You know that 
it is destructive to energy and industry, and 
that the taint passes from generation to gen- 
eration, and that a pauper family is more 
hopeless to reform than a criminal family. " 
(Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, in Outdoor 
Relief.) 

We are told to help the poor to help them- 
selves. The help they really need is help to 
get rid of us and of our charities, which are 
devices for keeping us astride of their necks. 

Many will not assent to this. Many who 
do assent will not see clearly, nor act logi- 
cally if they do see. They also are com- 
passionate. Let them support the charities. 
97 



Things as They Are 

"Let the dead bury their dead." Let those 
who are dead to the real knowledge of social 
needs hack at the branches of evil, for they 
know no better. Nay, by stinted means, 
compel them to apply themselves to find 
the most efficacious methods of relief and 
to seek the roots of misery and destitution. 
If you yourself do not know what is the 
matter, or are too lazy to think, why, then, 
give to the charities. On a business basis, 
charity is an excellent investment for the 
rich. All charities are excellent invest- 
ments; they are so recommended, even from 
the pulpit. They make taxes high, but we 
get it all back out of our pay-rolls. They 
are very cheap and, ethically, utterly worth- 
less. 

M System" takes all the good, moral and 
material, out of charity. Let us feel the 
evil, see the difficulties, know the poor, and 
try to raise them, because they are our 
friends and our brothers. So we shall give 
and get love, that which alone makes life 
endurable or heaven desirable. 
98 



Deliverance from Bondage 

Temperance appeals more to reason, and 
not less to sympathy; yet the efforts of tem- 
perance reformers are among the chief 
causes that the present condition of things 
is tolerated at all. They have impressed 
upon the public the evils of drink, so that 
the morally, mentally, or physically lazy 
soothe themselves with the idea that in- 
temperance is the chief cause of pauperism. 
It is not the chief cause: it is the chief 
effect. (See fable, "Incorruptible Inheri- 
tance, M p. .) 

So much for those who think that the gift 
of God, which is moral elevation, can be 
bought with silver or gold. 

It is hopeless to make men good by law. 
All that can be done is to give them free- 
dom, and let them work out their own salva- 
tion. To this the world tends. 

Notwithstanding the Armenian massa- 
cres, the persecution of the Doukhobortsis, 
the subjection of Finland, the Dreyfus case, 
the massacres in Italy, the Filipino free- 
booting expedition, and the Coeur d'Alene 

99 



Things as They Are 

"bull pen," we have no reason to think 
that there ever was in the world so much 
freedom as to-day. 

We hear much about Greek liberty and 
intelligence lost to mankind; but this com- 
pares the most advanced aristocrat of one 
age, the Greek citizen, with the mass of 
men of our own age. It would have been 
more absurd to refer questions of art to 
"the people of Greece, " including the vast 
majority who were "helots, M upon whose 
labours the few lived, than it would be to 
refer them to our own ignorant helots, who 
have at least intelligence enough to make 
comparisons. Of course, the dominant 
class got whatever it wanted then, just as 
our dominant classes get what they want 
now, and will continue to get it until our 
helots learn to care for one another's in- 
terests. 

In the times of Greek "liberty" only a 
few of the "people M of Greece got any of 
it; while, in most of the world, the idea of 
freedom had not yet dawned, 
ioo 



Deliverance from Bondage 

We read of the independence of the Pil- 
grim Fathers, who owned slaves and denied 
even votes to women. It has only just 
dawned on the world that slavery, chattel, 
economic, or sexual, for any being, is wrong. 

We hear a great deal about the increasing 
drift toward State regulation of industry. 
This supposed tendency is a trouble to Mr. 
Herbert Spencer. Investigation will show, 
however, that in reality no such drift exists: 
the current seems rather to be setting the 
other way. What looks like such a ten- 
dency in legislation is simply an attempt to 
meet new conditions by a partial application 
of old specifics. It is not necessary to 
examine our own legislation in detail, as 
a few words on Spencer's essays on The 
Neiv Toryism and The Coming Slavery will 
illustrate the point. Spencer refers with 
grief to fifteeen English acts passed from 
i860 to 1864, being two extensions of the 
Factories Act to include certain trades, acts 
regulating prices of gas, truancy, two for 
vaccination, hire of public conveyances, 

IOI 



Things as They Are 

drainage, employment of women in coal 
mines, authorised pharmacopoeia, two for 
local improvement in bake-houses, and in- 
spection of food. These are fair types of 
"socialistic" legislation everywhere. 

All these, except those for the hire of 
conveyances, employment of women, for 
coal mines, bake-houses, and inspection of 
food, are applicable to conditions which 
were not dreamed of a hundred years ago; 
and even these five appear to have been in- 
tended to correct abuses which have become 
serious only on account of the nineteenth- 
century crowding of cities and growth of 
factory life. 

From 1880 to 1883 Spencer finds eleven 
"socialist M acts of Parliament. They are 
for regulating advance notes on sailors' 
wages, for the safety of ships, compulsory 
education, excise, trade reports, electricity, 
public baths, lodgings, cheap trains, pay- 
ment of wages, and further inspection of 
bake-houses. 

Now compare these, one by one (to take 
102 



Deliverance from Bondage 

our samples mostly from incidental mention 
in the same essays), with the press gang law, 
which, up to the middle of this century, en- 
slaved the sailor; with the fifteenth-century 
law which prohibited captains from setting 
out in the winter; with the law favouring 
education by "benefit of clergy"; laws fix- 
ing the price and quality of beer; prohibit- 
ing the export of gold; with the laws which, 
up to 1824, forbade the building of factories 
more than ten miles from the Royal Ex- 
change; regulated the minimum time for 
which a journeyman might be retained and 
the number of sheep a tenant might keep; 
and, finally, those fixing the maximum 
wages of labourers and the size and price of 
the loaf. All these laws, of which the type 
is the fourteenth-century regime restricting 
diet as well as dress, aimed, like present 
laws, to correct what seemed to be abuses. 
They have all passed away, having failed to 
correct the "abuses. " 

How unreasonable, then, to pick out a 
few from over eighteen thousand laws to 
103 



Things as They Are 

which New York subjects its citizens, and 
because, under conditions a hundred times 
more complicated than those of our ances- 
tors, they restrain personal liberty in vari- 
ous respects or provide for State manage- 
ment, to say that we are advancing in the 
path of restriction ! 

The fact is that the growing pressure of 
misery, the growing perception that monop- 
olies are infringements of the rights of the 
people and that wealth is unnaturally dis- 
tributed, lead those who see no better 
remedy hesitatingly to apply ancient expe- 
dients for the cure of evils either new in 
themselves or newly perceived. Let us 
look at the truth, although one can only re- 
gret if even such socialism is not grow- 
ing; because, if it were, it would be the first 
sign of that Berserker rage which is sure to 
follow upon a universal appreciation of the 
deep evil of our present social conditions. 
The real social advance is on broader lines. 

There are three stages of moral regenera- 
tion: first, to understand that the present 
104 



Deliverance from Bondage 

state of the world is hell, — that is, injus- 
tice; second, to realise that there is a king- 
dom of heaven, — that is, of justice; and, 
third, to believe that we can get there. 
After that comes the knowledge of the way. 
The desire to get the kingdom is of little 
value or effect unless it is based on some- 
thing more than care for self, as distin- 
guished from others. 

The majority of men are at present satis- 
fied with things as they are. If they were 
not, they would change them. But they do 
not in their hearts desire the coming of any 
other kingdom but their own, which would 
be no improvement on the ■'devil's." If 
they do not believe in a better state, they 
will not desire it; or, if they do not desire 
it, they will not believe in it. 

It was not through accident nor through 
stupid materialism that we took one word 
"heaven" from the Anglo-Saxon "heafen " 
that which is lifted up. The higher place 
is ever the better, except for the lower man. 

"A political Utopia would be a physical 
105 



Things as They Are 

heaven, concealing a spiritual hell, — a mon- 
strosity. Society cannot be prevented from 
the external isat ion of its interior character 
by artificial arrangements of its exterior 
politically, nor be made to present scenes 
of justice and happiness, when the principle 
is not in the people. " — Stephen and Mary 
MaybelL 

The rich think that they have about all the 
good there is, and, finding it a delusion, are 
discontent with God, and say that the uni- 
verse is bad. The poor think that, gross as 
are the inequalities, they have a chance to 
get on top, and do not want a change until 
they despair of securing an advantageous 
place. All social reforms, except prohibi- 
tion, unite in showing the evils of present 
economic conditions, in showing that there 
might be better and that we can get the 
better ones. So that all those reforms are, 
for the present, united in their real result. 

Now, if, when the three stages are passed, 
we are to try socialism, we need not com- 
plain. It cannot be worse than our kako- 
106 



Deliverance from Bondage 

cracy. The great mass of people to-day have 
not, nor ever have had, the slightest confi- 
dence in freedom. Most persons know that 
our social system is robbery, but they think 
they share in the spoils. They think also 
that men must be restricted, prohibited, and 
circumscribed in some way, if they are to do 
right. To call anything "free " is to stamp 
it with opprobrium. "Free love, " "free 
rum," "free trade/' "free thought, " even 
"free press" and "free speech" (though 
the counting-house and the police make 
these but names compared to what they 
ought to be) are regarded as paraphrases for 
"unbridled license and anarchy." Public 
schools are called "free schools" in Eng- 
land, and are in corresponding disrepute. 

While all this is so, to impose upon the 
people any system which involves freedom 
would be only to insure its being discredited 
in repute and perverted in practice by men 
who care nothing for liberty and who would 
at once cast about for a means of taking 
advantage under it. All that improved 
107 



Things as They Are 

political conditions can do is to give men 
the opportunity of doing right, which they 
cannot have at present. 

But the spirit of humanity, — man-liness, 
as we call it, — which is behind socialism, is 
increasing. It expresses itself, as it best can, 
according to its light; and, though we may 
think the method wrong, we can see that 
that is of little consequence. "In the 
warming heart of the world is the hope for 
social justice. M All humane reforms aim 
at a voluntary co-operation ; which is right- 
eousness. 






108 



VII. THE LAND QUESTION. 

Ethical progress must be the progress of the 
race. — Opportunity necessary for this. — The 
animal nature the basis. — The first require- 
ment is the use of the resources of nature. — 
Denial of this use perverts the social system. 
— All share in the perversion, which condi- 
tions all actions, and makes fellowship impos- 
sible. — Expedients to correct effects of this, 
or to evade them. — The divine provision, sub- 
verted, gives all to the few, and makes ad- 
vances intensify evils. — We must begin at 
the bottom. 



VII. 
The Land Question. 

We must devote ourselves to the prepara- 
tion of the way to the external isation of 
the kingdom, which must first be realised 
within ourselves, but which will not stay 
within su unless we strive to extend it 
For to try to keep it to ourselves would be 
selfishness; that is, would be a return to 
the bondage of small desires and narrow 
thoughts, and the kingdom of heaven is 
liberty. The animal side of our nature nec- 
essarily develops before the mental and the 
spiritual side. Therefore, with the great ma- 
jority of our fellow-creatures, the release from 
the fierce struggle of the animal for a physi- 
cal existence is requisite before they can find 
time or energy even to consider intellectual 
or spiritual things. It seems hopeless to 
talk or think of spiritual elevation for 
the benefit of a car-driver who must work 
thirteen hours a day to keep the bodies 
and souls of his wife and babies together, 
in 



Things as They Are 

He has not even the time to listen or to 
read, nor can we in any sense get at him. 
It is true that one who has reached a cer- 
tain stage of interior cultivation can rise su- 
perior to conditions, even if he cannot rise 
out of them ; but how is the average man in 
our present state of social and political con- 
fusion even so much as to learn that there is 
a Holy Ghost ? 

The recent experiments in the ' 'cultiva- 
tion of vacant lots by the unemployed" 
show that men and women without skill can, 
with slight instruction, make trades-union 
wages, if they have access to the valuable 
and accessible land lying unused about our 
cities.* Merely to relieve deep physical dis- 
tress about us by a method so divinely simple, 
provides a means of instilling into the rich 
as well as into the poor the moral and 
spiritual truth of brotherhood. 

* See A. I. C. P. Notes No. i, published by the Association for Im- 
proving Condition of the Poor, New York, 1895, and Report of the 
Philadelphia (Pa.) Committee, 1898. Of course, the utilisation of vacant 
lots for the unemployed (the present system of land ownership still 
remaining) will ultimately make conditions worse by reducing wages and 
raising rents. 

112 



The Land Ouestion 

Man's body lives upon the land, and even 
the highest of men are in the chains of the 
flesh. When the material existence is made 
a slavery, because a few persons monopolise 
what nature's opportunities offer to all, how 
shall the masses learn to throw off those 
physical chains? 

While we live upon the labour of our 
brother, we shall find it hard to convince him 
that we are his loving brethren, even though 
we may call what we wring from him "rent 
of land " or " profits " of "real estate specu- 
lation. " Suppose you determine to absolve 
yourself, as far as possible, from participa- 
tion in the social evil by refraining from 
sharing in rent, interest, or "profits, M and 
to dig potatoes and live upon what you 
raise, as Tolstoy does. Then, besides 
spending time on raising potatoes which 
should be spent on raising mankind, as 
W. L. Sinton puts it, "To dig potatoes, you 
must either yourself own the land and be- 
come a land lord (and there is an end of 
equality and of fellow-feeling with the mass 
113 



Things as They Are 

of your fellow-men, who are not lords), rent 
land from some one else, or hire yourself to 
an employer. As ah owner of land, you are 
profited to the value of any rent of it with- 
out corresponding labour; and, if you raise 
potatoes, you enter into competition with 
other producers in a market already over- 
stocked, and prices come down, and labourers 
are thereby thrown out of employment or 
their wages are reduced. If you hire land 
instead of owning it, you must pay some 
one a rent for it, either a private indi- 
vidual or the State. If you pay rent to a 
private individual, it is worse than if you 
had received it, as you would put it to a 
good use, while probably the receiver of it 
will do harm with it. If, under the present 
system, you pay to the State, it is still as 
bad as either of the former, as the amount 
would either be wasted, or other taxes re- 
duced by the sum paid by you into the pub- 
lic treasury. If it is wasted, you are de- 
prived of so much power. If taxes be 
reduced, the value of land will rise, because 
114 



The Land Question 

it will be a better investment, and the 
difference be put into other land-owners' 
pockets, who would not spend it for the 
spreading of the truth, as you might have 
done. In either case, you have contributed 
to the evil system. 

"Even Tolstoy has made a failure of the 
theory of practical religion by overlooking 
this point of all points, this keystone of the 
arch, — that action is always conditioned, and 
that whether it comes up to the ideal formed 
before the attempt, depends as much on cir- 
cumstances as upon any will or effort of 
the actor. Did Tolstoy see this, he would 
see the futility of trying to practise, under 
existing systems, his ideal Christianity." 

No one can have a little private heaven of 
his own, for we are of one flesh and mem- 
bers of one another. Therefore, you and I, 
who see the truth, must stir the people to 
take possession of their material inheritance 
before we can share with them spiritual 
gifts. We may try to monkishly withdraw 
or to run away from the surrounding injus- 
115 



The Land Question 

tice, of which we, you and I, are a part; 
but evil is like the "black care, which sits 
behind the horseman :" or we may look, 
each of us for ourselves, from our heights, 
over into the promised land, but none of us, 
any more than Joshua, can go to dwell in it, 
except as a leader of the people, for "none 
of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to 
himself." 

You may build a fine locomotive, but it 
is useless unless you have the rails. And it 
will be folly to put down a rail here and an- 
other there: they must all be laid exactly, 
in a road properly prepared. The land ques- 
tion is analogous to the rails. The private 
ownership of the land is the cause of all 
causes which makes it impossible to use the 
locomotive of Christianity, or, in other 
words, to carry out in every-day action the 
precepts, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as 
thyself" and "Do unto others as you 
would be done by." There is no use in 
trying to overlook our solidarity and inter- 
dependence. If one member of society suf- 
116 



Things as They Are 

fers, all suffer, — a most beneficent provision 
of nature. Would not my saying that I can 
fulfil the law alone, or do a little less wrong 
than others, be as though my hands should 
say to my feet, "I have no need of thee? " 
Which cent is responsible for making up 
a dollar? 

In some such feeble way some persons at- 
tempt to straighten out the world tangle by 
paying the highest prices for everything, by 
refusing to deal with cheap stores, or by de- 
clining to buy sweat-shop goods. 

So long as there remains a demand for 
cheap goods, to pay high prices is simply to 
make a present of the excess of price to 
some middleman. Even if we take pains to 
see that the excess reaches the original pro- 
ducer, it will only be a form of bonus to 
him. You could get other things as good 
for less, but you choose to give him more. 
That is considerate in you and pleasant for 
him, if you really do not know any better 
way of doing than to give money; but it 
does not tend to raise wages. Rather the 
117 



Things as They Are 

contrary, unless you can make it universal. 
And, as poverty forces most persons to buy 
as cheap as they can, it is impossible to 
make it even general. To refuse to buy the 
sweat-shop goods is to throw the sweat- 
shop laborers out of work entirely, so that 
they will starve; for the buyers can afford 
only a limited amount for such things, and, 
if they get less of them for that sum, they 
will have to go without part, and less will 
be made. You are not punishing the 
sweater, who can turn to something else. 
Even if you can punish him, he is doing 
only what the necessity of trade compels 
some one to do. 

Our entire social organism is based upon 
private monopoly of land ; based upon the 
inequity of allowing some to monopolise 
that upon which all must live. To work at 
improving the present conditions of the 
earth, therefore, is clearly to do little else 
than to improve the condition of the owners 
of the earth. Suppose there are two towns. 
In one of them the people are ignorant, ir- 
118 



The Land Ouestion 

religious, disorderly, and dishonest. There 
are no street lamps, pavements, sewers, 
water-works, fire department, or other pub- 
lic improvements. There are gin-mills, 
dance-houses, gambling hells, a poorhouse, 
and a jail ; and they are always full. 

In the other town the people have no use 
for such things; and these buildings are 
replaced by schools, churches, libraries, an 
engine-house, and a concert hall. There 
are electric lights, asphalt pavements, pub- 
lic drains and water supply; and the people 
are intelligent, religious, affectionate, and 
mindful of the rights of each other. 

Which of these would be the more desir- 
able to live in ? 

Why, of course, the better town would be 
far preferable. 

And would more people wish to go there 
than to the other ? 

Naturally. 

In which, then, would the rent and the 
price of land be the higher? 

Necessarily, in the better town. 
119 



Things as They Are 

For whom, then, are the good government 
club, the pastor, the educator, and the pub- 
lic-spirited citizen of that town mainly 
working? Is it not for those who get the 
enhanced prices for the land and who collect 
the enhanced rents? 

Ralph Waldo Emerson said about the 
early days of Boston, in a paper published in 
the Atlantic Monthly for January, 1892 : — 

"Mora! values became also money values. 
When men saw that these people, besides 
their industry and thrift, had a heart and 
soul, and would stand by each other at all 
hazards, they desired to come and live 
here. A house* in Boston was worth as 
much again as a house just as good in a 
town of timorous people, because here the 
neighbours would defend each other against 
bad governours and against troops. Quite 
naturally, house rents rose in Boston/ ' 

While present economic conditions re- 
main, any reform or improvement will in- 

* Of course, Emerson meant the building site, not the building. The 
house could be built more cheaply as the community became more 
mutually helpful. 

I20 



The Land Question 

crease production or increase population, 
therefore increasing rent; that is, increas- 
ing injustice. The first necessity of man is 
the earth, which includes all the resources of 
nature; and from it, by his labour, comes all 
produce. 

It is an infidelity to a loving Creator — 
it is to charge God with folly and to impute 
unto the Almighty lack of understanding — 
to say that man has been put upon an earth 
on which he cannot support himself except 
by living on his fellows. But he must be 
allowed to get at the earth. 

If the earth is really our mother, or 
if we are the children of a common 
Father, then all have equal right to use the 
earth. There is a communal cause of land 
value which should make it a common in- 
heritance. This must be taken for the use 
of the community. As the value increases, 
the increase also should go to the commu- 
nity, so that no one can confiscate part of the 
labour of his fellows by appropriating land 
value to himself. As soon as all the value 

121 



Things as They Are 

of land is taken by the public, speculation 
in land and the withholding of it from use 
will cease, because it will be unprofitable; 
and men will be free to use the earth, the 
source of all raw material, in order to pro- 
duce wealth and capital for themselves. 

The reform, then, of our present land 
" system/ ' which is not any better than 

" The good old rule, the simple plan, 
That they should take who have the power, 
And they should keep who can," 

is not the end of reforms nor the sum of re- 
form. It is, as a great teacher has said, 
"the gateway of reforms. " More than that, 
it is the one reform without which all 
others will be self-destructive, because they 
tend to increase either population or produc- 
tion, and thereby to increase rent and so to 
foster every form of monopoly. 



122 



VIII. MAKING FOR RIGHTEOUS- 
NESS. 

Men must work out their own nature, although 
blindly. — They can be guided, but not helped. 

— Trying to help with money ; practical effects. 

— The use of money. — Recognition of the 
liarmony of the universe. — Stages in groivth 
necessary to all. — The tuition of circumstances 
and the use of pain. — Unity of our interests 
taught by consequences of ill. — Rising above 

a in. 



VIII. 

Making for Righteousness. 

Reform must come by common desire; 
for action does not constitute right nor wrong. 
Wrong does not consist in doing th :: 
wrong is being and desiring something not 
the I 

So long as men enjoy fighting, they will 
fight. If you stop them fighting with their 
fists or guns, they will fight with tongues or 
tariffs, producing infinitely more misery 
and infinitely slower instruction. We may 
defend ourselves from attack as long as we 
are so situated that we are subject to it, and 
as long as we desire to defend ourselves. 
That is the limit of our right to use force. 
And whatsoever is more than this cometh of 
stupidity; that is, of evil. 

There are few who have learned the lesson 
that to succeed by wrong-doing is failure. 
The fact is that most persons are satisfied 
with the present reign of robbery, for they 
think that they have a chance in the game 
125 



Things as They Are 

themselves. Even when they perceive that 
they are victims of it, they do not see that 
they are the necessary sacrifices in the 
brutal sports : they think that greater efforts 
made by themselves would have prevented 
the suffering, instead of merely shifting it. 
They cannot be taught their error by exter- 
nal force. Nor can men be taught by mere 
mechanical instruction, however perfect the 
machine. Outside powers, like organisa- 
tion or money, which we speak of as 
"means, " will hinder about as much as 
they help. To attempt to raise mankind by 
gifts, even devoted to their education, is to 
set the devil's workmen to build the city of 
God, which is not made with hands, but with 
hearts. Says N. M. Jerauld: "I am tired 
of hearing about the 'uplifting of the 
masses. ' If they are lifted they prove but 
a dead weight, for they have to be carried. M 
"If only some rich man would leave us 
ten millions in his will, we would get the 
social question settled at once, " so said 
an ardent and capable reformer. That 
126 



Making for Righteousness 

would be the greatest misfortune that could 
happen to any real, moral reform. 

To some of us who have not had the com- 
mand of much money, and to those who, 
being at the head of affairs, feel the need of 
money and see where it might be used to 
advantage, it seems as though it were all in 
all; but, for me, the more I see of the 
effects of money, the more I am convinced 
that, although there is great need of it in re- 
form work, great sums given impersonally 
and without sacrifice are a hindrance rather 
than a help. 

To see how it would work, see how it 
often does work. 

Here is a man or woman, poor, like the 
most of us, earnest, energetic, unpaid, giv- 
ing his or her days and nights to propaganda 
or organization. At once the general com- 
mittee becomes rich, hires, with such wis- 
dom and disinterestedness as a committee 
can muster, those who are most available or 
who can get themselves hired. Even a rich 
committee cannot hire everybody, and our 
127 



Things as They Are 

friend is left out. He thinks: "The com- 
mittee is paying these people, many of them 
not so good workers as I. Why should I do 
the same work for nothing? The labourer is 
worthy of his hire. Let them pay me, or 
find some one else to do my work. " 

Perhaps the committee does engage him. 
He becomes an agent. His words and his 
example have lost their weight. His very 
sincerity begins to be questionable. "It is 
all in his day's work." He must perforce 
teach, even if he does not think, according 
to the platform. Even platforms are not 
infallible. When he has done his day's 
work, his evenings belong to himself. 
Who will do the night work? 

Or, here is a new field of work, not the 
best or most promising one perhaps, but one 
which you or I, with our capacities, could 
do, and do well. Oh, no. Suggest that to 
the committee. They can easily have it done 
for money. But the committee overlooks or 
cannot oversee that work, and it is not done 
at all. The work is neglected in spots. 
128 



Making for Righteousness 

Then a multitude begin to follow the 
teachers for the loaves and fishes, and 
scarcely will even divine wisdom pick out 
the true apostles. Why, the very leading 
body comes to love other objects than the 
success of the mere idea. 

"But we could sow the nation knee-deep 
with literature." The British and Foreign 
Bible Society is nearly a hundred years old, 
and is publishing bibles at the rate of 
13,000 a day, or about 4,000,000 a year. 
Between March, 1804, and March, 1893, 
this society alone distributed throughout the 
world nearly 137,000,000 copies of the 
bible. There must be bibles enough in the 
world to reach every one of its inhabitants 
who is able to read. 

That is but one of hundreds of agencies 
distributing religious literature free, and, 
what is much better, paid for. The world 
is not evangelised even so. 

"But if it were all put to the best use, if 
we could thoroughly advertise this theory, 
we could get it taught in the schools, — 
129 



Things as They Are 

force it on the attention of the people." 
Then we would gather a vast crop of the 
partially instructed, we would attract 
crowds who, through mere carelessness or 
incapacity, were with us only in desire and 
name. We would force an unnatural and 
unhealthy growth of sentiment for our re- 
form, and we should get it enacted, probably 
in some bastard form, — at any rate, in ad- 
vance of the real sentiment of the people. 
Like other reforms which have been forced 
upon communities from time to time, it 
would be enforced partially and unfairly, 
and would probably be repealed. 

Real progress would be set back ten 
years. Far better our present condition, 
where those of us give who can, not as a 
charity or as a duty, but because we had 
rather spend our money that way; where 
there is nothing in the cause to attract to it 
the parasite or the mercenary. Where the 
carrion is, there will the vultures be gath- 
ered together. In the present condition of 
society, if we are to be pure, we must be 
130 



Making of Righteousness 

poor, and do good work with our own heads 
and hearts and hands, not with our check- 
book and the resolutions and appropriations 
of a committee. 

It is true that money has a real function, 
and all owe "duty" as the expression of 
feeling. Where it is really a sacrifice, 
sometimes made holy, it is doubtless ac- 
ceptable. It is even necessary that the 
priests may be fed. But where it is 
wheedled by "fairs," or extorted by beg- 
ging, or "left" by those who regret only 
that they cannot take it with them, it does 
do, and can do nothing but harm. Figs 
do not grow on thistles, nor grapes upon 
thorns.* 

Most persons, justly, have to spend their 
lives in doing things to which they have no 
natural inclination and in which they have 
almost no success, nor can have any. This 
is part of the school course, and must always 
be so, until we have learned all that this de- 
partment can teach. Those who get enjoy- 

* See also Disease of Charity, by the writer of this. 
131 



Things as They Are 

ment out of uncongenial tasks are those who 
most perfectly accept them as a matter of 
course, — as Tolstoy says, "as what must 
be. " This state of mind is common to 
almost all uneducated persons, and in this 
respect they are infinitely superior to us. 

The effect of education should be to teach 
us how to cure, not the hard consequences, 
but the causes of wrong, and to make us 
desire to cure these causes. We sometimes 
say that we live in an evil world, with an 
implication that we are not a part of it. 
We are a part of it. 

We do not know why we willingly re- 
ceived the ideas that made us reformers 
or philanthropists or church workers or 
thinkers, nor why another's mind rejects 
some of these ideas. Was it not because 
we had reached a stage that they have not ? 
Then how are they to blame for not accept- 
ing these ideas ? and how does our acceptance 
of them separate us from such persons or 
make us less guilty than they, although they 
do evil ? 

132 



Making for Righteousness 

It is to this very evil in the world that 
we owe the stage of development that we 
have reached. It is by our experience of 
it that we have acquired our consciences. 

The misfortunes of generations are devel- 
oping within us a consciousness or * 'con- 
science" by which we perceive, what we 
might have perceived by spiritual insight, 
that it is not for the happiness of a commu- 
nity, of which we are a part, to steal or to 
lie. How partial this education is, as yet, 
may be seen from the fact that most men, 
while admitting abstractly that lying is 
wrong, contend that under some circum- 
stances it is not only not wrong, but act- 
ually praiseworthy. Had we been bred in 
an entirely different surrounding, for in- 
stance, as London thieves, our "con- 
science M would have pricked us every time 
we passed a watch and did not take it. We 
can understand this, when we hear a man 
who has sold some article for a fair price, 
but thinks that his customer would have paid 
higher, say, "I ought to have got more. " 

i33 



Things as They Are 

If we could remove ourselves from the 
opportunity of doing things which we think 
to be wrong, or cease to take part in the 
evil of the world we would lose our sym- 
pathy with others and arrest our own devel- 
opment, which would have come through the 
painful experience that we shirk. We suf- 
fer in the same ways when we subject our- 
selves to external restraint, even through 
the "influence " of a friend or of a church. 

To those who understand the law of life, 
pain is no mystery. Physical suffering fol- 
lows on every injury to the body, and fol- 
lows whether we commit that injury our- 
selves, or suffer it from another, — follows 
however good or innocent our intent. If 
a fall or a bruise did not hurt, we would 
permit or perpetrate injuries on ourselves, 
until we learned by the severer penalty of 
disablement that we had erred. But, just as 
no one can create wealth, or do any other good 
thing without benefiting, in some respects, 
others as well as himself, so no one can do 
any evil without injuring others as well as 

J 34 



Making for Righteousness 

himself. Our sufferings may therefore be 
the results of our own errors, or of the 
offences of others of /whom we have never 
even heard. This may seem unjust ; but it is 
a part of the unity of the human race, which 
will eventually lift up all its members, in- 
stead of dividing them (as might happen, 
were suffering allayed) into three or more 
permanent classes, corresponding to the de- 
velopment of different individuals. 

Suffering will continue until we have, not 
only learned, but taught to all mankind, all 
its errors. In the mean time the enlight- 
ened man can obtain such understanding 
and control of pain, whether physical, men- 
tal, or emotional, that it ceases to be an evil 
to him. Pain is not an evil in itself: it is 
the burglar alarm, which tells of an attack 
or of something which ought to be cor- 
rected. If we do not know how to shut off 
the burglar alarm when it has given its 
message, or if we fail to close the door, the 
alarm continues, and becomes a nuisance. 
When we understand the pain, and have 

i35 



Things as They Are 

such control over ourselves that we can 
right the wrong, we can stop the pain. 
Any one can try this for himself, when some- 
thing hurts him, by saying: "Yes, I under- 
stand what is needed. There is a trouble 
not with my real self, but in my foot. I 
have the message, and am attending to it. " 
And he will find that the pain will be min- 
imised, and will become more tolerable. 

We know that minds unconsciously influ- 
ence one another, often in ways that we 
cannot understand, producing, for instance, 
panics and unaccountable popular crazes or 
depression. This subtle sympathetic influ- 
ence may be deliberately exerted for good: 
good spirits are as infectious as bad. By 
practice, we can learn to concentrate such 
powers, — to order our minds so that their 
entire influence will be exerted continuously 
in one direction and on one person. This 
is "mental treatment, " and can be turned 
in upon ourselves. But, if it be used only 
for ourselves, or used for evil purposes, the 
power will weaken; for love is at the bottom 
136 



Making for Righteousness 

of sympathy, and neglected or useless faculty 
eventually disappears. There are many that 
teach that in a similar way we may * 'at- 
tract M wealth or anything else by putting 
our minds into close relation with money- 
making thought, so breeding money-making 
opportunities. This is probably true; but, 
as the money is gotten away from some one 
else, this is not really what these catch-penny 
prophets say it is, — "the power of mind to 
create things. " 

The editor of the Christian says: "The 
ones who are grasping after money or any- 
thing else drain every one with whom they 
come in contact ; and they will also drain 
themselves as dry as the desert. " They 
certainly will, for the way to get is to give. 
Mental treatment is a form of control 
of mind by mind, which can easily be ex- 
tended so as to do away with depression. 
"The blues" are unnecessary; for our own 
minds are entirely within our own control, 
even in the hardest circumstances. If you 
find anything disagreeable, just determine 
i37 



Things as They Are 

that you will enjoy it, — at least, that you 
will not let it annoy you. The next step 
will come later, and you will find that the 
thing will have ceased to be disagreeable. 

If men ever learn to correct every wrong, 
merely because it is wrong, aches and suf- 
ferings will become unnecessary, and will, 
therefore, be suppressed in the ordinary 
course of nature. Pain will then become 
like a door bell, which strikes only once or 
twice to call attention to a particular condi- 
tion. 

In the mean time each one can train one's 
own nerves to be quiet when they have de- 
livered their message. 



138 



IX. THE END OF DESIRE. 

Unlimited control of mind over matter. — 
Mind not dependent on things. — The spirit- 
ual life ; happiness not the Jiighest good. — Ac- 
quiescence in the order of the ttniverse is happi- 
ness. — It comes unsought, with understand- 
ing. — It is an interior state, within our ; each 
and under our own control. 



IX. 
The End of Desire. 

There are some who claim that they 
have attained such understanding of the 
universe that all material things can be 
produced by them at will. This seems 
impossible. To talk with any one a thou- 
sand miles away seemed impossible a few 
years ago, till we learned the law of sound 
and applied it in the telephone. Greater 
things may be possible when we learn to 
apply greater laws. To do the impossible 
is no stranger than to see the invisible, to 
attain which most of us believe is possible. 

Though you or I have not attained that 
power, we may easily realise that material 
things do not make us rich or poor. If it is 
true in any degree, as the poet says, that 

" Stone walls do not a prison make, 
Nor iron bars a cage," 

if 

" My mind to me a kingdom is," 

may it not be true that there is a still more 
141 



Things as They Are 

extensive and real kingdom in the spirit? 
If one is convinced that nothing can affect 
his real self, that he is as much a part of 
the universe as oxygen is a part of the air, 
he will be conscious that he has already en- 
tered into eternity and that he himself is 
infinite now. 

There is no promise of a mere future life, 
in any inspired book; the promise is of life 
eternal, the life of love, for which we do 
not wait until we die. 

Of course, one who has not yet even seen 
that there is any existence higher than the 
mental existence, will scoff at this idea, just 
as one who has not seen that there is any ex- 
istence but the animal existence will scoff at 
the idea that emancipation from the animal 
nature is possible, thinking that every one 
must be as he is, all shut up in the prison- 
cell of circumstances. 

Life is, as the scientist says, ' 'continuous 
adjustment of internal relations to external 
relations. M Where is the limit to that ad- 
justment with its increased perceptions and 
undreamed of powers? 
142 



The End of Desire 

Because to the ordinary man— that is, 
to the animal — the search for happiness is 
universal, we are taught to believe that it is 
not only the right object, but the only possi- 
ble object of life. We find, however, that 
happiness is the one door which, to him 
that knocks, shall not be opened, the thing 
which whosoever seeks shall not find. May 
it not be, then, that there is an object in 
this life, the pursuit of which in itself will 
be worthy and yet will, incidentally, bring 
more happiness than will the pursuit of hap- 
piness itself? That we cannot conceive of 
any other course than to seek for happiness, 
and that we cannot imagine any other object 
in life, does not prove that there is no such 
object. It proves only that we have not de- 
veloped or have not exercised any sense 
which could perceive it. 

We search for what we think will minis- 
ter to our pleasure, and we surround our- 
selves with the materials for a full and 
satisfying life so that these desires and 
circumstances become a part of our con- 
struction. 

143 



Things as They Are 

As a black man is one whose blackness is 
a part of himself, not one who can wash off 
the blackness, so a "rich" man is one 
whose riches are a part of himself. He can- 
not leave them off, nor can he take them 
with him : therefore, it is hard for him to 
enter the kingdom of heaven. He who has a 
reputation which he is anxious to defend is 
also one of these rich, still a slave to desire. 

Nirvana consists in knowing, and being 
willing, that all things pass away. Seek- 
ing special happiness or the fulfilment of 
special desires brings, in the nature of 
things, no permanent satisfaction. On the 
other hand, he who seeks not happiness, 
which means he who has ceased to desire 
the maintenance of his separate life, who, 
in other words, loses his life, finds happi- 
ness and life in every moment of existence, 
and sees that death is an acceptable step in 
joyous existence: gentle and lovely death! 
When you seek happiness, which is com- 
plete life, it flees from you : when you cease 
to seek it, you find it ; for, behold, you have 
144 



The End of Desire 

been looking abroad for that which lay at 
your own door, — nay, more, for the very 
thing which you already possessed and 
which possessed you, but of which you were 
not conscious. When a man reaches this 
stage, he can say with the poet, — 

" Nothing there is to come, and nothing past 
But an eternal now doth always last." 

or, again : — 

" Would you lose your life, you find it, 
And in giving love you bind it 
Like an amulet of safety to your neck forevermore." 

This, which is so secured, is not less con- 
sciousness, but more complete conscious- 
ness, — is life itself, which is greater than 
to live. In this state, desire is eliminated 
by the perfect at-one-ment of the individual 
with the cause of all desire. In this state, 
we are everything and live in everything, 
and yet are not overshadowed by any one 
thing to the exclusion of others. The mo- 
ment a thing possesses us, pain begins. 

When we realise that we are a part of the 
H5 



Things as They Are 

Infinite, we are no longer dependent upon 
circumstances for our happiness. All hate, 
which is separation, is then put aside and we 
realise perfect love and live in perfect love. 
This is the " kingdom of heaven " manifested 
in ourselves and in regard to all others. 
When we have attained it, we cease to regret 
errors or mistakes. Whatever we have done 
was a necessary step in our education. We 
deny that even our actions were evil : they 
have been put behind us, and they cease to 
trouble us. We desire more experience, no 
matter of what sort. When this knowledge 
and experience become perfect, we are at 
one with nature; and we become as gods, 
acquiring power over every form of matter. 

Enlightened teachers will substantially 
agree that this is the truth which underlies 
all kinds of "Christian " and "mental" 
science. The prophets and the adepts only 
show us how to realise and to apply the 
truth to our daily life. 

Do you see anything that you desire? 
Wait. As you grow in the higher knowl- 
146 



The End of Desire 

edge, you shall have all that you want, or 
else have the good it can give, without the 
burden of possessing it. 

Why do we want money or even health ? 
That we may have the power and opportu- 
nity of higher and better life. For every 
one knows that, if money be used for oppres- 
sion, or to extend a base life, it can bring 
nothing but evil, expressed in misery. If 
we learn to get the freedom and to have the 
power over all things, then we do not need 
the money. 

"The struggle of each to get rich is the 
struggle of each to break into heaven on 
earth physically, instead of entering it spir- 
itually. " The higher life is independent of 
money and of everything else. To an en- 
lightened man, it will make no difference in 
his actions whether there is a future life or 
not. He knows that happiness follows 
right thought, therefore wrong ceases to be 
a temptation; and he 

" Whistles the Devil to make him sport, 
For he knows that sin is vain." 

147 



Things as They Are 

The thought and the happiness are interior 
and under our own control ; but actions are 
under the control of others. 

After earth there maybe punishment; — 
that is, consequence of good or ill. There 
is no revenge. If there is consequence 
then, it will be for the same reason that it 
is now, that we may learn. A wise man 
would not wish to be delivered from the 
consequences of his acts, either hereafter or 
here. 

To enjoy all things and all persons in 
their time and place to the utmost, yet to be 
dependent upon none ; to be enslaved by no 
thing or personal form, to know that, if 
angels go out, arch-angels come in; to live 
our lives to the fullest extent, exercising 
our highest powers, — that is rest, happi- 
ness and peace; peace that will be perfect 
and permanent when it is broadened and 
merged into the peace of heaven upon earth. 



148 



FABLES. 



The Generation of Vipers. 

Stupidity married his sister Selfishness; 
and there were born to them two children, 
Servility and Tyranny. 

These grew strong, and mated with each 
other. From them sprang Crime and Mo- 
nopoly, twins; and their parents nourished 
the twins until they brought forth hateful 
Strife. From her spring all the furies that 
corrupt the kindly world. 



151 



The 

Comfortable Comforters. 

"When a child is crying," said Sister 
Charity, "the first thing to do is to soothe 
and comfort it. Until you do, the child will 
hear neither reason nor instruction " ; ("nor 
even then," she added). 

"When a child is crying," said Dr. Di- 
vine, "the first thing to do is to purify and 
regenerate its little heart. Until you do, 
children's sorrows will never end"; ("in- 
deed, sorrows have no end," he added). 

"When a child is crying," said Judge 
Law, "the first thing to do is to restrain and 
punish those who made it cry. Until you do, 
children will always be blubbering" ("and, 
after that, still more," he added). 

"When a child is crying," said the Dis- 
turber of the Peace, "the first thing to do is 
to find out what makes it cry. Until you 
do, you can't remove the cause." 

"Why, we wouldn't want to remove the 
cause," said the others : "we'd have to re- 
move ourselves. " 

152 



Failures of the Ages, 

There was a Man : stupid was he, and 
brutish. Yet he harried wild beasts and 
wilder men. It chanced that men came 
upon him and upon his child, and the child 
they would have taken for their food; but 
the Man withstood them, so that he was 
slain; and after all the child was taken by 
the men. Their children wondered at the 
Man. 

There was a Man : ignorant was he, and 
fierce. Yet he fought with beasts and sav- 
age men. And it happened that men fell 
upon his villagers, and most of them es- 
caped ; but the Man stayed behind, defending 
women. At last the Man was killed, and 
the women were carried away by the men. 
Their children made a mound above the 
body of the Man. 

There was a Man : weak was he, and dull. 

Yet he strove with chiefs and furious 

priests. It befell that, when his tribe went 

man-catching, the Man refused to help. 

i53 



Things as They Are 

Therefore the priests commanded that he be 
burned; and the tribe went as before. For 
the Man their children built a tomb. 

There was a Man : poor was he, and un- 
learned. Yet he pleaded with the unthink- 
ing, and with savage creeds. It came to pass 
that the rulers went astray, and he cried out 
to them. The rulers heeded him not, so 
that his heart was broken. Then he died, 
and the people mocked his sayings. 

Their children called the Man a prophet 
of the Lord. 

Yet, in every striving, it was given to the 
Soul to see that only he attaineth to the 
measure of a Man, who, with whatsoever 
light he hath in life or death, treads out the 
paths of God. 



i54 



The Joy of the Working. 

I thought that I was a husbandman whom 
God sent into a dreary world. I toiled 
breaking up the hard earth and clearing off 
the ground, but the more I worked, the 
rougher looked my plot ; for, where the 
briers were cut away, stones showed through 
the shale. 

I was tired; and, when I saw God, I said 
to him that the vines went astray faster than 
I could straighten them, and that where I 
planted my grapes, wild grapes grew up in- 
stead. God said to me that there was 
strength in the wild grapes; and I said, 
"Ay, Lord, but look at the stones. " God 
said, "Do not I need the stones? " 

And, when I saw that God watched me as 
I worked, I said, "The toil is hard, but I 
shall see the fruit. " God turned away, 
saying, "You shall not see the fruit. " I 
cried after him, "But there will be fruit, O 
Lord? " and God said, "For all your labour 
you get strength, not fruit. " 



Things as They Are 

I said, complaining, "Lord, it were so 
much better to find wild flowers that might 
be trained to be more beautiful ; but there 
are always thorns for me to cut." And 
God said, "If there were not thorns, I had 
here no need of such an husbandman as 
you." 

I went on working, for then I knew that 
I was labouring to make the Garden of the 
Lord that is to be. 



156 



The Motive Power. 

"Why don't you do something practi- 
cal?" said the Engine to the Fire. "You 
have been getting up steam all day, but that 
rock still stands in front of us." 

"The boiler is large," said the Fire. 

"Why waste your strength agitating the 
water?" puffed the Engine to the Fire. 
"Now, if you would light directly on that 
rock, your heat might some day crack it." 

"There is a principle," — said the Fire. 

"It's not principle that we want : it's ac- 
tion ! Splash the water over the rock, so 
that at least we can clean it." said the En- 
gine to the Fire. 

"Our drill has made a little hole in the 
rock. " said the Fire. 

"But now the drill has stopped," puffed 
the Engine to the Fire. "You don't make 
any progress, and the hole is all filled up." 

Just then the engineer took a spark of the 
Fire, and touched it to a fuse. The rock 



*57 



Things as They Are 

went up in the air. The Engine went on 
puffing. 

"Why don't you do something practical, 
like that? " said the Engine to the Fire. 



158 



A Masque of Life. 

The moonlight streamed over my face so 
that I awoke; and in the clear, cool light 
I saw a great round hall, and in it the child- 
ren of the Spirit worked and played. And 
on their faces, as on every face, was written 
what they were. Two were Birth and Joy, 
and two were Life and Love, and two were 
Sleep and Death. They wove garlands for 
each other; Birth they crowned with 
strength, and Life with holiness, and 
Death with peace. So the children walked 
together, and every step was like a dancing- 
step. And Plenty spread a feast for 
them. 

While I looked, other children came to 
them whose names were these : Stupidity 
and Selfishness. These took Death's crown 
of peace, and burned it in the fire, and bound 
his brows with superstition. They made a 
mask for him out of a skull. They painted 
the face of Life with streaks of care, and 
covered Birth with a robe of misery. 

159 



Things as They Are 

When Love saw what it was they did, she 
opened a door upon which was written 
"Wisdom. " Behind it was a long and 
painful stair called Knowledge. At the top 
the stair was dark, but I could see Love's 
garland that shone as she began to climb. 
She called to the others, "Come with me, 
children, — come." None followed her but 
Joy. Sleep would have gone; but the others 
gave her poppies, and bright wine to drink, 
so that she stayed. 

When Love was gone, the children played 
no more ; but they invited Want and Pain to 
visit them; and they made knives of cun- 
ning, and clubs of base desires, and with 
these they fought until they could fight no 
more. 

The children went to another door on 
which was written "Happiness," and they 
knocked upon it with their clubs and cut at 
it with their knives. They pushed each 
other back, lest one should open it for him- 
self. But the door was shut to all. 

I lay watching them, it seemed to me for 
1 60 



A Masque of Life 

thousands of years, yet the forms of the 
children were still the forms of youth; but 
the eyes of Sleep were red, and she looked 
often and sadly round for Love, and Life 
stared gloomily at the ghastly mask of 
Death. 

With each in turn walked Want and Pain. 
These were old acquaintances of my own, so 
I looked closely at their faces ; and, though 
I hated them, I saw in that clear light that 
their eyes were kindly eyes. While I 
watched, they led the children to the door 
of Wisdom ; and the children opened it a 
little, and some began to climb, and threw 
aside their hideous garb. Selfishness could 
not go, for he was lame and blind. Want 
and Pain tried to lead Stupidity, but Stu- 
pidity would not be led. 

The children climbed; but, as they went, 
they looked to see who followed them, and, 
when they saw who stayed behind, they 
turned to bring them up. And, behold ! 
they saw that the door of Happiness was 
opened wide. The moonbeams filled the 
hall. 

161 



Things as They Are 



As I lay thinking what it meant to me 
Selfishness and Stupidity vanished from my 
sight. Want and Pain went up the stair: 
the moonlight faded from the room. 
I slept again. 



. 



162 



The Better Way. 

The Rev. Christian Method went as a 
missionary to the Malays; and to such an 
extent were his efforts blessed that, no ships 
having come near his island home for over 
a year, he persuaded the Chief to abandon 
piracy in general and wrecking in particular. 
So complete was the transformation wrought 
upon these savages by the gospel, that the 
theory of moral sentiments became the staple 
of conversation, and every child on the 
island attended the annual Sunday-school 
picnic. 

One afternoon, however, a fine brig was 
driven in toward the coast by a storm ; and 
the islanders watched her with great and 
natural interest. As night drew on, it be- 
came evident that she was sinking fast, and 
that, although the wind had subsided, if she 
did not shortly make the harbour, she would 
be lost. 

It was, therefore, with feelings of keen 
distress that the reverend man observed his 
163 



Things as They Are 

parishioners preparing to kindle false lights, 
according to the ancient custom of that land. 
When he remonstrated with the chief, that 
economist explained that the unaided vessel 
would sink, in any case, and that the lights 
were intended only to run her on the rocks, 
so that, as in civilized countries, the people 
might profit by the misfortune of others. 
The islanders were poor, and the winter 
coming on, and "men must live. " 

In vain the reverend father pointed out 
the wrongfulness of such a course. The 
Chief replied that it was their country, and 
that they were entitled to shape its policy 
for their own benefit, though this involved 
distress to foreigners. At the word "our 
country' ' a thought flashed on the clergy- 
man. He said : — 

"This is, indeed, your island, is it not?" 

"Of course, " replied the Chief. 

Then said the holy man, "Let me ad- 
vise: pollute it not with murder or with 
robbery. If you sink the ship, not only 
will much of the goods be lost, but the lives 
164 



The Better Way 

of the sailors, too. Kindle true lights, give 
aid to the ship, show them how to beach her 
safely on the sand inside the bar, and 
then" — 

"What?" cried the Chief. 

"Why," replied the saint, "charge them 
all they have as rent for living on your 
land." 



1 6 S 



A Finance Committee. 

"Chris, there's too many of you shoe- 
makers. ' ' 

"How do you make that out, Pat? " 

"Why, there's too many shoes; and it's 
you that makes them. Look at those boxes 
of them : they can't be sold. " 

"I think," says Chris, "it's you hat- 
makers there's too many of. Look at the 
stock of hats in every shop, going out of 
fashion before they are used." 

"Well," says Pat, "what are you grum- 
bling about? You're wearing a shabby 
enough hat " — 

"It's no worse than your boots," says 
Chris. 

Pat scratched his head. "No," he said, 
"but there is overproduction of boots. I 
heard that in Mr. Rockefeller's * School of 
Social Economics.' " 

"I think," says Chris, "it's a lack of 
circulating medium. I read that in 'Coin's 
Financial School.' " 

1 66 



A Finance Committee 

" Stuff!" says Pat. "I'll trade you a hat 
for a pair of boots; that is, when I get 
some fur to make it out of and find time to 
make it, I have to work twelve hours a day 
now. " 

"Well, I'd like to trade; but, you see, I 
have to sell every pair of these shoes at the 
best price I can get for them, to get some 
clothes for the children. I made the grocer 
take out his bill in shoes last week, because 
I haven't any money; but I can't spare any 
more. The rent is due this week." 

"Gad," says Pat, "I'll try that on my 
land lord. I'll make him take hats. I 
don't believe he'll do it, though ; for he gets 
his rent in advance. Guess he'll put me 
out first. Then how will I sell hats, or 
trade them, either, with no place to live at 
all, at all?" 

"Mine would put me out for sure," says 
Chris. 

"Sure, I thought you owned this 
shanty ? ' ' says Pat. 

"So I do own the shanty, but I pay 
167 



Things as They Are 

ground rent; that is, I put up the shanty 
myself. The land lord claims that he owns 
it now." 

"Why don't you move over to the field 
opposite, and" — 

"Why, the owner there would charge me 
all I could make, just the same as this 
one. " 

"Well, if you get him to take a pair of 
shoes or so, what will he give you for 
them ? ' ' 

"Oh, if he takes the shoes, he won't put 
me out. M 

"I'll take the shoes; and I won't put you 
out, either," says Pat. 

"Don't talk nonsense. You don't own 
the land. He does." 

"How did he get it? " 

"Bought it, same as you will have to buy 
my shoes? " 

"From the one that made it, same as you 
made the shoes? " 

"Well, no," says Chris, "I suppose he 
bought it from some one that got it from the 
168 



A Finance Committee 

Indians. 'Crows' they called them. I 
hear tell they were Chinese originally." 

"Sure the Indians didn't make it, nor 
even fence it in. I don't believe the Ind- 
ians owned it anyhow, any more than the 
crows that flew over it." 

"Well, anyway, he has it now, and the 
lots opposite, too. The people here wanted 
to dig the sand out of them, but he wouldn't 
let them at any price. If he had, the peo- 
ple around here would be doing well. It's 
hardly taxed at all, either; and I have to pay 
a lot on this bit of a shed. D— n the land 
lord ! He does nothing but collect the rent. 
Here he is now. Mr. Onus, I ain't got the 
rent yet. 

"Ain't got the rent ? If you ain't got the 
rent, Chris, you'll get the sack. Why 
don't you go out and peddle your shoes? I 
never saw so many people around here with 
bad shoes. " 

"Well, you see, sir, it's their rent day, 
too; and no one seems to have any money for 
bread, let alone shoes." 
169 



Things as They Are 

"Well, now, I'll tell you what it is, my 
man, " says the land owner, "I'll wait till 
Monday, and not a day longer. I've heard 
all about you. You spend your time think- 
ing and stirring up your neighbours, instead 
of working hard, as every man ought to. 
You're a kind of anarchist. " 

"Say, Pat," says Chris, "do you know 
what I think? There's an overproduction 
of land-owners. Why don't we vote to tax 
those fellows out of their boots? " 

"Faith, I would," says Pat, as he showed 
his toes. "It's long enough they've taxed us 
out of ours. " 






170 



The Inspiration of the 
Mighty. 

Samson looked at the gates of Gaza. 
They were vast, rusted on their hinges, 
locked and fastened into the frame of 
stones. He said: "Many were they who 
lifted those gates into their place, and I am 
but one man. Can I, then, lift them up? " 
He thought, "Yet shall immortal glory 
come to me if I lift them; but they will 
crush me." And he looked again at their 
huge bulk, and halted; for the strength was 
not in him. 

Then he said, "Am not I, even I, who 
will die and be forgotten, the Champion of 
Right!" And, because the power of God 
flowed into him in self-forgetfulness, he 
heaved the mighty gates, and bore them from 
the wall. 



171 



The Clarion that Calls. 

As Samson was grinding at the mill, a 
messenger of Jahveh visited him, saying, 
" Samson, you are in misery: rise up and 
free yourself !" But Samson answered, 
"The toil is hard ; and, when it is finished, I 
have no strength left," and turned again to 
his task. The messenger said again, "Jah- 
veh will deliver Philistia into your hands." 
And Samson said, "What is that to me, for 
I am blind?" Yet he raised his sightless 
eyes. Then he bent again to toil. 

The messenger was cast down. Neverthe- 
less, he returned, and said, "You are strong, 
yet your own sons live in slavery." Sam- 
son answered, "Were my labours lightened, 
then might I deliver them." And, as he 
spoke, he stretched his arms. 

The messenger said to himself, "Surely, I 
have been sent in vain." Howsoever, he 
turned once more, and cried, "The children 
of Israel sigh by reason of the bondage; 
rise up, and you shall deliver them." Sam- 
172 



The Clarion that Calls 

son answered, saying, "But the Philistines 
will slay me." And the messenger an- 
swered, "So will it be, Samson: your 
brethren need your death." And Samson 
said, "To-morrow they make sport of me, 
and to-morrow God will deliver his people 
by my hand. " 

For his soul had learned to see that death 
is not better than life : that, having given 
his life for love, a man may not withhold 
his death. 



173 



Current Economic Litera- 
ture.* 

It appears from the preface of this re- 
markable book that a lot of diaries, discov- 
ered in an old sail-loft, extend to the return 
to the island, and give some account of the 
economic difficulties which Selkirk (Robin- 
son Crusoe) experienced in his famous 
State. His principal trouble was that Fri- 
day was chronically out of work, and event- 
ually became a "submerged half. " Bread- 
fruit, fish and skins were easily obtained; 
and, after Robinson had eaten and wasted 
and worn all that he possibly could, Friday 
was unable to find employment for which 
Robinson could pay him by letting him 
keep part of what he had gathered and made. 
It will be remembered that Robinson made 
a spear from a stick, some traps, and baskets 
from reeds. These complicated the social 
problem, because they increased production, 
so that Robinson could not use it all. 

* The Private Memoirs of A lexander Selkirk. Published by the 
Bogus Press Company, Samoa, 1899. 2 vols. Calf, 8vo. $12. 

174 



Current Economic Literature * 

After the arrival of Friday's father and 
the Spaniard, the social pressure became 
more intense. Friday was very good at 
climbing trees to gather fruit; while Satur- 
day, his father, was quite clever at netting 
fish, and the Spanish proletariat was skilful 
in spearing goats. Consequently, employ- 
ment became differentiated; and Friday 
spent his whole time in gathering fruit, get- 
ting such prodigious quantities of it that 
Robinson could not eat it all and most of 
it rotted. 

The same result followed the use of Sat- 
urday's net and the Spaniard's spear, so 
that wages went down, and the three work- 
ingmen were reduced to want. They as- 
cribed their poverty to the introduction of 
machinery. Of course, Robinson could have 
allowed the labourers to use a part of his 
island to support themselves; but, as he ob- 
served, there would then have been no rea- 
son why they should work for him rather 
than for themselves. Indeed, they might 
even have made spears, nets, and baskets for 
175 



Things as They Are 

each other. It was not possible for Robin- 
son to charge them rent; as he tells us in 
his story that he had all the things he 
needed, even before immigration began. 
He might have given them food as charity, 
but that would have pauperized the popula- 
tion. 

But Robinson was a man of political gen- 
ius and resource. He divided the island 
into three portions, prohibited immigration 
into each, and established high tariffs on 
everything. One division took in all the 
water, another nearly all the hills and 
woods, and the third was pasture and garden 
land. 

Part of the increased population was now 
provided with a comfortable place, guarding 
the lines. To be sure, this part lived at the 
expense of the others; but he "relieved the 
labour market. " Under the new regime, 
Saturday, who was fond of fish, but was cut 
off from the sea, had to work all day to get 
bread-fruit enough to buy a mess of fish, 
which it took Friday a day to catch. A 
176 



Current Economic Literature 



* 



large surplus accumulated in the treasury, 
which it was no easier to dispose of than to 
dispose of a deficit, as there was no one to 
steal it, and no one to make war upon. 
Prices, however, instantly rose, so that, in 
order to get a bunch of bananas, it was nec- 
essary to gather a bushel of oysters or to give 
a whole goat. The "system " worked beau- 
tifully, and the domestic industry of raising 
infant goats on sand was greatly stimulated. 
They were continually "on the eve of pros- 
perity. " In fact, the only trouble was that 
Robinson got the gout, and Friday's father 
and the Spaniard starved to death. 



i77 



Dividing the Spoils. 

A Rich Man, a Poor Man, a Beggar Man, 
and a Thief decided to do business as a 
partnership, instead of competing as before. 
They were to share the profits, and none of 
them being very good at arithmetic they 
agreed to divide on economic lines. 

The Beggar Man said: "I will have the 
interest for my share. I can get a banking 
act passed, so that we shall have the money 
to trade with; and I will do the lending." 
The Rich Man said: "I will have the rent 
for my share. I can get a grant of land, so 
we shall have the place to work on; and I 
will do the collecting. " "And I will have 
the wages for my share," said the Poor 
Man. "I can get nothing else, so we will 
have the product ; and I will do the work- 
ing." "And what shall I take? " asked the 
Thief. "You can take notice," said the 
Beggar Man. "Or you can take a back 
seat," said the Rich Man. "Or you can 
take yourself off," said the Poor Man. 

178 



Dividing the Spoils 

"No, I can arrange it better than that," 
said the Thief. "If the firm can't steal, it 
will fail in business. I will take all that 
is made out of Monopolies for my share. I 
can scheme to get subsidies, and I 
will do the thinking." The Poor Man 
whispered, "We haven't any monopoly." 
So the Beggar Man said, "That's all 
right." And the Rich Man added, "He 
can build a lunatic asylum with his share." 
They all agreed accordingly, and opened a 
commission house. 

"I will take a rest," said the Landlord 
Man. "I'll get my rent in just as well." 

"I will take a vacation," said the Capi- 
talist Man. "I'll get my interest all the 
same." 

"I will take my time," said the Thief. 
"I'll get there just as well." 

"And I will take a tonic," said the 
Labouring Man. "I'll get small pay on 
pay-days all the same." 

When they came to wind up, they quar- 
relled so about the division that they called 
in an economic accountant to be the Judge. 
179 



Things as They Are 



The Rich Man said : "My rent is the same 
that the adjoining land brings in. It's easy 
to determine that. " "Yes," said the Judge 
Economist, "the rent is easily fixed, but 
two-thirds of it is monopoly rent: that goes 
to your partner, the Thief." "The interest 
is 6 per cent, for me/' observed the Beggar 
Man; "that's easily figured." "Inter- 
est in nearly all due to monopoly;" inter- 
posed the Judge; "but we might concede 
you i per cent." "My wages," said the 
Poor Man, "should be calculated on the 
trades-union scale." "You've had a liv- 
ing," said the Judge; "and that's what 
wages tend to, that's easily understood. 
Anyhow, that's all there's left." "I'm 
left myself," the Labourer said. "The La- 
bourer is right for once," the Rich Man 
said. "I have been there myself," the 
Beggar Man remarked. 

"I accept my award," returned the Thief, 
"though it ought to have been more." 



1 80 






The Sins of the World. 

(a nightmare.) 

A certain man went down from Jerusa- 
lem to Jericho, and got into a trolley car. 
He had no stock in the line, and could not 
stop the car. The car rushed furiously over 
an unguarded crossing, and ran over a little 
girl. The man's car crushed the head of 
the child. (Thou art the man.) 

A certain other man went from New York 
to Georgia, and got into a mob. He had no 
acquaintances in the town, and could not 
stop the mob. The mob rushed furiously 
down the street, and ran over a little 
girl; and the man's foot crushed her face. 
(I was the man.) 

Which, now, of us two, thinkest thou, 
went down to his house justified rather than 
the other? 



181 



Of One Flesh. 

He was a rough sort of Western fellow 
that sat beside me at the steamship table, 
and he would eat with his knife. Now I 
am a sensitive sort of man, and that an- 
noyed me greatly. Therefore, during din- 
ner, I looked black at him, and politely 
passed him forks till his place looked like 
a sample tray. We did not speak but I 
could see that he felt antagonistic. He did 
not seem to make any attempt at amend- 
ment. Perhaps that was obstinacy or hate- 
ful pride. 

One day it was very stormy; and, as I 
went to the cabin hatch to get a breath of 
air, I found him standing at the door. 

The sea was dark and gloomy, and the 
chill wind blowing out of a dull sky kept up 
a monotonous roll of sea. I turned, and 
looked at his face. It was sad, and drawn 
with care. I am not an ill-natured man, 
so I said cheerfully, "It's rather gloomy, 
isn't it?" "Yes," said he sadly,— "yes, it 
182 



Of One Flesh 

looks very dark to me. When I came out 
three months ago, it all looked very bright. 
I'll tell you," said he. "I'm not an old 
man, but I have done pretty well and made 
my pile; and, after her poor mother died, I 
came out here with my little girl to show 
her the world and let her enjoy our money. 
She was just eighteen, and you never saw 
such a — We went to Rome, and ' ' — 
He stopped a minute, and I looked out over 
the sea. "I'm coming home without her. 
She took the fever, — she took the fever in 
Rome; and " — 

He turned suddenly, and stumbled down 
the companion stair. 

I felt lonely now myself, for I knew that 
it was the soul of a Man that had looked out 
upon the restless sea with me. How blind 
I was that I had not seen till then ! It was 
my brother who sat beside me at dinner, 
very silent, and eating with his knife. I 
passed him no more forks. One does not 
mind the little failings of one's friends. 



183 



Monopoly's Plea for Char- 
ity. 

The Old Man of the Sea was riding on 
Sinbad's neck, and Sinbad daggered under 
the weight. "Help this poor Soul," cried 
the dear Old Man. "Won't somebody lend 
him a huid ? ' ' The kindly disposed had pity 
on Sinbad, and gave him a stick with which 
he supported his tottering steps. The Old 
Man was much more comfortable, and grew 
more fat. Sinbad's knees were giving 
away. "How miserable the lower classes 
are! " said the good Old Man. "We must 
have systematic aid." The benevolent folk 
got a long crutch for Sinbad. He got on 
better, so the Old Man piled his baggage on 
Sinbad's back. Sinbad reeled, and almost 
fell. "He should have religion," cried the 
pious Old Man. So he rode him to 
church three times a week. 

Still Sinbad staggered about. "It's 
moral restraint that Sinbad needs," said the 
pleasant Old Man. So he gave some of 
184 



Monopoly's Plea for Charity 

SinbacTs breakfast to a dog to snap at his 
heels. Sinbad pitched blindly on. "Edu- 
cation is what he wants," said the kind Old 
Man. 'Til teach him to trot." So he 
jumped up and down, as if Sinbad were trot- 
ting. Sinbad seemed as weary as ever. 
"The condition of the labourer is intolera- 
ble," cried the sweet Old Man. "He must 
have government aid." So he made Sinbad 
fan himself with his hat. 

But Sinbad became dissatisfied, and even 
dishonest. So he "upset society," and 
threw the Old Man off into the sea. Poor 
Old Man! deprived of his vested rights 
and position; not even done by degrees. 
The unhappy Old Gentleman should have 
compensation — from Sinbad. 



185 



The Revolutionists. 

"Those are come hither also, who have turned the world upside 
down." 

There was a man who wished to turn the 
world upside down. So, when he had 
taken the lever of discontent, he made a ful- 
crum in the land of dreams, and pushed. 
Because there was nothing to resist him, he 
seemed to do great work. But the world 
turned on its way, and does not even re- 
member him. 

There was a man who wished to turn the 
world upside down. And, when he had taken 
the lever, he laid hold upon a star for a ful- 
crum. But, when he began to push, the star 
was so far from the world that he got no 
power at all; and his heart broke with the 
straining. And he also is forgotten. 

There was a man who wished to turn the 
world upside down. He found the lever, 
and used a balloon for a fulcrum. It was 
made of pride, and varnished with self-con- 
ceit; when he pushed upon the lever, the 
1 86 



The Revolutionists 

balloon burst, and the man fell. And 
only hell remembers him. 

There was a man who wished to turn the 
world upside down. When he had taken 
the lever, he rested it upon the sands of 
self-interest, and many came and helped 
him, and pushed mightily upon it; but the 
sands slipped, and the world rolled on and 
crushed the man. And the memory of him 
rots. 

There was a man who wished to turn the 
world upside down. And, when he had taken 
the lever, he planted it upon the Rock of 
Righteousness; and, when he found that the 
world was stronger than he, he allied him- 
self with the powers of the Kingdom that 
is at hand. Therefore, when he pushed, 
the whole round world was overturned. 

The world forgets him, like the rest; but 
his name is written in the Book of God's 
Remembrances. 



187 



How " Progress " Stopped. 

The rumble of a coming storm had been 
heard for a long time, but the upper classes 
mistook it for the humming of the wheels of 
prosperity. The mob had broken out again 
and again, and had been shot down. The 
impunity of the deputy sheriffs at Home- 
stead, and later at Lattimer, where unarmed 
men were slaughtered, encouraged such vio- 
lence. The hands of authority had been 
strengthened. By flattering local pride and 
conceding appropriations for armories, mi- 
litia regiments had been increased. After 
the Spanish War, various scares were care- 
fully nurtured by the monopolistic news- 
papers, and the standing army and navy 
were greatly increased. The propaganda of 
the socialists, the philosophical anarchists 
and the single-taxers, however, had been 
vigorously carried on during the whole time. 
By the advice of the Kansas Appeal to 
Reason, the agitators gave special atten- 
tion to the police and to the army. But 
1 88 



How " Progress " Stopped 

the people at large did not seem to take 
interest even in the choice of judges, so that 
when strikes occurred among the miners, 
and rapidly spread over the various mining 
districts, injunctions covering every possi- 
ble act toward the continuance of the strike 
were promptly issued by Judge Showalter, 
Judge Allen, and others. The strike, in 
the face of such orders of court, backed by 
deputy sheriffs in the employ of the coal 
roads, seemed hopeless; and Mr. Carnegie, 
whose counsel had been sought by the mine 
operators, announced in an interview given 
the New York World, that the back of the 
strike was broken. 

The miners, however, peaceably but per- 
sistently, and in great bodies, ignored the 
injunctions. They were arrested in crowds 
by the deputy sheriffs paid by the State, but 
nominated under the law of 1897, by the 
mine-owners. The deputies were well 
drilled; and, when the Lattimer plan was re- 
peated, not one of the marching strikers 
escaped. The popular indignation was un- 
189 



Things as They Are 

bounded. Even the deputies were appalled 
at the destruction made by their weapons. 
As usual, little confidence was felt in the 
militia, therefore, federal troops were 
called out to protect the sheriff and his 
men. So great was the uneasiness on the 
part of monopoly that General Miles himself 
took command. A howl of joy went up 
from the subsidised press, but there were 
some who felt that such heroic measures 
were inopportune. 

Many of the clergy, led by Rainsford of 
New York, protested against military vio- 
lence, but in vain. 

A conflict was provoked by the sheriff 
in person; he and his party were wiped 
out by the sheer force of numbers of the dis- 
employed hungry workers, although after 
frightful massacre. The soldiers were hur- 
ried to the scene. To the horror of the plu- 
tocracy, the soldiers refused to shoot. 

The president of the Pennsylvania Rail- 
road, the principal road directly interested, 
advised a cessation of hostilities. He 
190 



How " Progress " Stopped 

pointed out that the police had failed in the 
draft riots in New York in 1863; that the 
militia had proved unreliable in the Pitts- 
burg riots in 1877; and urged that the ex- 
perience of Chicago in 1893, when the 
strikers were allowed to uncouple cars 
guarded by troops, should have shown that 
it was rash to play the last card of repres- 
sion. 

In vain. The soldiers were promptly 
court-martial led, and twenty of them con- 
demned to be shot for mutiny. Their com- 
rades refused to execute the sentence. 
Roosevelt by offering to lead the marines 
in "restoring order" only added to the sen- 
timent against violence. 

At the suggestion of J. Pierpont Mor- 
gan, the forces of plutocracy united, and 
most of the factories were shut down, on the 
plea that it was dangerous to bring the work- 
ing classes together in that temper. 

The payment for the poorer sort of houses 
all over the country stopped. Most people 
had no resources; and the few who had 
191 



Things as They Are 

money saved, seeing the rows of vacant 
buildings, refused to pay any rent. The 
district court calendars were choked with 
dispossession cases, every one of which was 
cared for by young lawyers ambitious of po- 
litical preferment. The judges, unwilling 
to add to the confusion and distress, and 
bidding for their re-election, allowed every 
technical defence, and, although without 
authority, always granted time (as they had 
long been accustomed to do) to dispossessed 
tenants to move. There was difficulty in 
finding marshals to execute, in the face 
of frequent resistance, the few warrants 
granted. Capital became frightened ; and a 
tremendous panic set in, beginning in Wall 
Street. Scarcely any money remained in 
circulation; a system of barter by store 
orders, and of individual and corporate cir- 
culating checks sprang up, the usual pro- 
hibition of which, under the ten per cent. 
" State bank tax," the district attorneys had 
no means of enforcing. Most of the very 
rich fled to Europe or retired to their coun-* 
try homes. 

192 



How " Progress " Stopped 

The stocks of merchandise became ex- 
hausted; and, as nearly all production had 
ceased, the price of everything rose enor- 
mously. 

The workers, seeing the unsatisfied de- 
mand for goods, began to organise into 
groups, and to get the use of factories for 
themselves. This self - employment was 
greatly facilitated by the use of electric 
power for small and isolated industries. 

Then employers generally, began to weaken. 
The corporations were afraid to trust arms 
in the hands of even their private detectives 
and special police: their condition was 
becoming desperate. Sales of real estate 
had ceased : the courts were overcrowded 
with foreclosure suits. The distress in 
the middle and ordinarily well-to-do classes 
set them to thinking. The charities and 
poorhouses, and the jails especially, 
were overburdened, insomuch that it was 
impossible to find room for the prisoners. 
The magistrates and governors discharged 
every one they could, and the police ceased 
to make arrests. 

i93 



Things as They Are 

When spring arrived, destitute workers 
began to cultivate unused lots. The entire 
force discharged from the Hocking Valley 
and Calumet mines began to take coal and 
copper from the idle mines. It soon be- 
came apparent that the authorities were un- 
able to enforce the laws for the protection of 
such property. However, life was safe; and 
there was far less moral delinquency than 
usual, — a fact which caused no little com- 
ment and comparison with a similar experi- 
ence during the reign of the Communality 
in Paris. 

The lack of currency was readily supplied 
by the organisation of mutual guarantee as- 
sociations among those whose checks and 
orders were circulating as currency. The 
superiority of guaranteed notes was so evi- 
dent that all issuing money were shortly 
forced into a central association. Gradually 
it dawned upon the workers that they were 
succeeding without the "employer. " They 
began to see that they could employ them- 
selves if they were only left what nature 
194 



How " Progress " Stopped 

had supplied; so the mines began to fill 
with the old hands, who, appointing such 
superintendents as were necessary to avoid 
confusion, established a new order of 
things. "Why," said they, "should we 
wait for the nod of the mine-'owner, ' who 
levied the blackmail of rent upon our labour ? 
If we pay gratuities to any one, let them be 
to the poor, not to the rich." So at a 
great meeting held by representatives of the 
workers, it was decided to lay aside for 
public purposes a certain percentage of 
each ton mined. 

As to the reimbursement of the original 
mine-owners, there was at first a feeling 
that they should be paid for their "prop- 
erty" ; but Eugene V. Debs pointed out that 
the original title to all these lands was 
obtained through trick and fraud, either from 
the Indians or through an "imperial " char- 
ter to some faithful courtier. The commu- 
nity had been a loser by the ownership of 
land for all the many years past. No one 
could be found to stand up for the landed 
i95 



Things as They Are 

"proprietor. " The miners urged that the 
cost of the very tools had been extorted by 
monopoly from labour, and that they were 
but reclaiming their own. Later, however, 
to silence complaint, the owners were given 
certificates, redeemable in product, for the 
value of their machinery and "plant." 
These were paid off in a few months. 

The means of transportation soon be- 
came a vital point of attack. The compa- 
nies operating the various lines had at finst 
refused to carry any product of the miners, 
and finally stopped running completely, 
in order to demoralise the new labour 
community. But, the employees of the roads 
appealed to the recently established gen- 
eral labour bureaus of the States, and it was 
decided that, inasmuch as it was for the 
public welfare that the workingmen should 
be employed, the companies should resume 
work. The companies flatly refused, and 
the roads were finally seized in the interest 
of the community. Compensation was 
granted to the holders of railroad securi- 
196 



How " Progress " Stopped 

ties, based upon the actnal cost of the roll- 
ing-stock and plant; and this was generally 
approved, as it gave every really innocent 
holder all that he could justly claim. 
By the very acts of seizure the union of the 
classes was strengthened and confidence 
bred. Labourers began to think that in 
working the mines and in the public owner- 
ship of the rail highways their toil was 
not only improving their general welfare, 
but actually adding to the wealth of the 
country, instead of to that of a few individ- 
uals; and, when men think hard, they gener- 
ally develop something. Seeing their power, 
the people turned out to the primaries, and 
elections took on a new aspect. New judges, 
upright men of the people, soon occupied 
the benches formerly held by "disturbers of 
the peace," as the old magistrates were 
dubbed. Everything made by labour was 
exempted from local taxation and execution 
for debt, and sufficient income for the gen- 
eral government expenses was derived from 
taxing corporations and such privileges as 
197 



Things as They Are 

could not be abolished. The demand for 
labour, created by the anxiety of land-owners 
to get something out of their holdings with 
which to pay the high taxes, convinced the 
people that a tariff was not needed, and it 
was abolished by annual reductions extending 
over four years. The general disregard 
of land titles, where land was held unused 
and for speculation, forced capital into 
productive enterprises. Occupation and use 
of land, with the payment of yearly as- 
sessments based on the public value of the 
same, gave every one that preferred it, op- 
portunity to labour for himself rather than 
to take a place in the mills and factories or 
offices of the great cities. 

An attempt was made to import Slavs and 
Huns as " defenders of society" and to 
organise them as deputy sheriffs, special 
police, and labourers. But the influence of 
our course, coupled with the concessions 
by European rulers, to the people, due to 
the fall of the Spanish throne and to our ex- 
ample, was found to be so decided that no 
198 



How " Trogress " Stopped 

influx of European immigrants could be re- 
lied upon; and the few who came, quickly 
joined the ranks of free labour or struck out 
for themselves. 

The threat of those formerly in power, 
that " progress " would stop, was answered. 
Progress stopped for the few, to be sure. 
But the mine toilers rather than the mine- 
owners, the community rather than the few 
railroad bond-holders, the many landless 
rather than the land lords, found that prog- 
ress had begun when the deputies' rifles 
were fired in the final strike. 



The Sans-culottes. 

" Miners in Hocking Valley seven dollars 
and fifty cents a month ? " said the Professor 
of Social Economics. "Oh, the cure for 
that is to raise the standard of living. My 
patron, the good Mr. Stonefellow, is just 
shipping champagne and cigars to take the 
place of their beer and pig-tail plug. Then 
they won't work so cheap." 

"That is right," said the Charity Organ- 
iser. "What the poor mostly want is a 
want. To be sure, they want breeches 
now; but that's not what I mean." 

"It seems to me," said the Ignorant 
Man, "that a man without breeches has 
a very definite want." 

"They should have a change of heart, not 
a change of raiment," observed "General" 
Bungalow. 

"We must teach them temperance by 
books," said Mr. Templar. "Then they 
could save all their seven dollars and fifty 
cents for food and luxuries and — and — 
breeches, you know." 
200 



The Sans-culottes 

"A higher tariff is what they need," said 
Mr. Homestede. "You see, if they paid 
more for everything, then those who supply 
them would have more money to buy their 
coal." 

"But," said the Ignorant Man, "the 
Creator made the coal for the land-owner ; 
and the Sans-culottes are not allowed to 
mine it. It isn't their coal." 

"That's an abstract question," murmured 
the University Settler. "The thing to do 
is to get near to these poor miners, and then 
we shall understand their needs." 

Said the Ignorant Man, "I understand 
that they need breeches now." 

"It should be made more profitable to 
have the country opened up," remarked Mr. 
Subsidy. 

"I would rather make it less profitable to 
have the mines shut down," said the Igno- 
rant Man. 

"Nonsense! That's Utopian. What is 
needed is to make the miners all church 
members," said Dr. Mission Nary. 

201 



Things as They Are 

"Like the mine-owners? " asked the Ig- 
norant Man. 

"Now you haven't studied this prob- 
lem, " said the Professor. "It's very com- 
plex, but this diagram will make it clear. 
WANT are the axes. Let b represent the 
supply of necessaries. — " 

"Breeches? " asked the Ignorant Man. 

"Don't interrupt," said the Professor. 
"Then # will represent the cost, and a the 
men : therefore, the curve b a x is the effi- 
cient demand. Now, to find the marginal 
utility of b y if we extract the square root 
of b " — 

"Will the square root of b cover a man's 
legs? " inquired the Ignorant Man. 

"No," whispered the Professor, "but our 
theories about it will cover man's inhu- 
manity." 



202 



Philosopher Dog. 

I suppose I must have been half asleep 
when I heard Snap whine, "Yeow arn yow 
ell." It sounded like, "You aren't very 
well." Strange! I listened again. How- 
ever, I am fond of Snap, and sometimes 
talk to him. So I said: "No, I'm not well. 
Monopole is after the rent of the farm, 
and I haven't got the money." 

"Rent?' 1 said Snap, quite distinctly. 
"What's rent?" 

"Why," said I, "it's what we pay to be 
allowed to live on any part of the earth 
that's good for anything." 

"Oh!" said Snap, "you know I caught 
a rabbit yesterday. He was so fat he could 
hardly run, so I know all the rabbits will 
be fat. You aren't as plump as Mr. Mon- 
opole. 

"No," said I. "You see Monopole' s my 
landlord. I pay him for letting me work 
this farm. " 

"Why do you do that? " 
203 



1 



Things as They Are 

"Well," I said, "it's hard to make it 
clear to an unreasoning mind; but, you see, 
the King of England granted — that is, eh, 

— the Indians long ago — er — the people of 

— I mean that generations past agreed — 
Oh, say, you couldn't understand that: 
you're a dumb animal." 

"Dumb animal!" said Snap, indig- 
nantly. "It's you that's dumb. I have 
yelled at you every night for six years, and 
you have never even answered me till now." 

"I thought you were baying at the moon," 
said I, politely. 

"Baying! Stuff! Dogs don't bay at the 
moon. The light keeps me awake, so that 
I feel the rheumatism, and I yell at you to 
get me a warm bed. Don't men keep yell- 
ing when they are uncomfortable? " 

"Well, no," I said. "They mostly say 
it's due to hard times, and that there's no 
good grumbling. " 

"What did you say dogs are?" said 
Snap. "Manimals, was it?" 

"No, dumb animals," I said. 
204 



Philosopher Dog 

"I heard you barking at night one No- 
vember. Were you baying at the moon? " 

"No, you stupid beast. I was shouting 
for Sound Money and Protection. " 

"Did you get the Sound Money? " 

"Oh, yes, we got it all right." 

"Then," says Snap, "why don't you pay 
your rent with it ? " 

"Well, I didn't exactly get it myself; but 
the country did. " 

"And do you own some of the country? " 

"N-o, but we all get the Protection." 

"What's that?" 

"Why," I said, "I will try to be simple. 
It's a way of keeping people from eating or 
wearing English things." 

"Are English things poison, that you 
keep people from eating them?" 

"Oh, no, they are just as good as ours; 
but they cost less. " 

"Then you certainly are rather simple 

i not to use them. Willie has a guinea pig 

shut up in that little pen in the front yard, 

so that it can't get at the English clover. 

Is that Protection ? " 

205 



Things as They Are 



f No, that' 



I 



restriction, 

"But if the clover were shut out from the 
guinea pig, instead of the guinea pig shut 
in from the clover, would that be Protec- 
tion ?" 

"It seems — but we were talking about 
the landlord/' I answered. 

"Is Willie the guinea pig's landlord, 
then?" 

"Something like that," I said, al- 
though I had never thought of it before. 

"Would the guinea pig stay there if it 
were as big and wise as you? " 

1 i No, of course not. ' ' 

"Then is Mr. Monopole bigger and wiser 
than you? " 

"Oh bother! Don't you know old Mon- 
opole yourself? " 

"If he's no wiser than you, I'm sorry for 
him," said Snap. w Is " — 

"Say, Maria, this dog won't let me rest. 
I wish you'd put him in the barn." 

As Snap was pulled out, I heard him yell 
out angrily: "Barking at the moon, indeed! 
206 



Philosopher Dog 

Why, the moon is two hundred and forty 
thousand miles off; but it's not as much off 
as the master. " 

Snap thinks too much. Such dogs are 
dangerous. 



207 



A License to Live. 

"Say, Master Renter/' said Snap the 
first time he got me alone, "isn't that rent 
you told me about like the dog license? " 

"Why, yes, in some ways. How do you 
mean? " I asked. 

"I heard the collector tell you that fifty 
cents had to be paid for me to live. " 

"Yes," I answered. "He said that was 
because dogs kill sheep and go mad." 

"Would you kill sheep and go mad, if you 
didn't pay rent? " 

"Maybe," said I. "I suppose I'd be an 
anarchist." Then, to turn the subject, I 
added, "But, if I didn't pay fifty cents for 
you, you'd be shot." 

"Then Mr. Monopole will shoot you if 
you don't pay rent? " 

"Why, no," I answered, "he won't 
shoot me, but he might as well : he will put 
me off the farm. Then I'll be a tramp." 

"Do they shoot tramps? " 

"No," I said, "they only shoot strikers 
so far; but they put tramps in jail." 
208 



A License to Live 

"Mr. Monopole couldn't put you any- 
where: he's too weak and fat. Besides, I'd 
bite him." 

"You're a good dog," I said. "Mono- 
pole certainly couldn't put me off alone; 
but all the people in the country would help 
a land lord, if necessary, to get his rights, — 
that is, to get his Ian — I mean to say, to 
put me off. " 

"Then all the people in the country are 
land lords except you? " asked Snap. 

"Dear, no," I said. "Only about one 
in every eight owns any land; and, even of 
those, the most, instead of paying rent to a 
land lord, pay interest to a mortgagee." 

"Then why would they help? " 

"Because they, or, rather, the masters of 
their ancestors, made the law that way." 

"I don't see that that's any reason," said 
Snap, "but I have an unreasoning mind. 
What's interest? " 

"Interest," I said, "is what we pay for 
the use of bills that we get from the bank." 

"Why don't you make them yourself? " 
209 



Things as They Are 

"Because the law allows only people who 
have fifty thousand dollars to issue money." 

"Who made that law? " asked the dog. 

"Why, we did," I said. I knew he was 
going to ask why. So I added, "You know, 
'To him that hath shall be given. ' 

"Do you think, then," said Snap, "you'll 
be given any brains? " 

"It isn't my fault," I said desperately. 
"I'm only one of those that made the law 
that way." 

Said Snap: "If I were you, I'd rather be 
shot like a striker than help in such laws. 
What is a striker, anyway? " 

"A striker," I told him, "is a man who 
won't work for the wages he can get." 

Snap scratched his head with his hind 
leg. "Do people get paid for working?' 1 
he asked. "I thought you said that you 
paid Mr. Monopole for being allowed to 
work." 

That's just like a dog. Dogs and women 
shouldn't be allowed to talk, when they 
can't vote; and you can't make them under- 
stand 6ur political economy, 
no 



Is Thy Tenant a Dog? 

"What's wages? " asked Snap. 

"Wages are — They are some of the 
wealth a workingman makes, which he gets 
for making it. ' ' 

"What is wealth?" 

"Wealth, of course, " I said, "is any- 
thing which people want, produced from 
land by work." 

"Oh ! But I thought it was you working- 
men who made all things. Why don't you 
keep them all ? " 

"Because workingmen are like draft ani- 
mals : they don't appreciate their power, 
and they don't unite. They distrust one 
another." 

"I wouldn't do that. But, then, I'm 
only a stupid beast. What are you ? ' ' 

"I'm — I'm — looking out for myself, ' ' I 
said. 

"When I caught the rabbit, you gave me 
the skin and bones. Was that my wages? " 

"I suppose so." 

211 



Things as They Are 

"If I'd caught him on your land, I'd have 
owed you another rabbit for rent, wouldn't 
I?" 

"Yes, but you got him on Monopole's 
land. He owns all the land here. He 
would charge you rent, only he doesn't know 
you catch rabbits. " 

"If the crop of rabbits failed so I couldn't 
catch two a day, then how could I pay? M 

"I guess you'd have to dig potatoes at 
night with your paws : like me at the harvest 
time," I added bitterly. 

"Why, then," says Snap, "the rent gives 
employment and diversified industries." 

"Yes, like the tariff," I said. "But, 
then, it accumulates capital. ' ' 

"What's capital? " asked the dog. 

Said I: "Capital is that part of wealth 
used to produce more wealth. When I gave 
you your breakfast, which enabled you to 
run all day after the rabbit, that was an ad- 
vance of capital." 

"I see," says Snap. "Then, if you'd 
charged me interest, you would have kept 
212 



Is Thy Tenant a Dog. 

the bones, and I'd have had to starve on the 
skin. " 

"I'd have to feed you anyhow, because I 
own you. ' ' 

"Does old Monopole have to feed you? " 

"No," I said, "of course not." 

"Then hadn't you better get old Mono- 
pole to own you ? ' ' 

"Nonsense!" I said angrily. "This is 
a free country. ' ' 

"Why," says Snap, hotly, "you told me 
Monopole owned it. ' ' 

"Yes," I answered. "But the men are 
fr — that is, men can't own a man in the 
United States." 

"What's a man?" 

"A man is a reasonable animal." 

Snap rolled over laughing, and laughed 
himself into a fit. I don't know what he 
was laughing at, but I don't like dogs with 
fits. 



213 



A Clean Heart. 

There was a woman that desired to have 
Love for her guest, for she knew that where 
Love is, Joy cometh, and Peace abideth. 

Therefore she made clean the chambers of 
her heart. She opened the doors, and pre- 
pared the entrance. She swept out preju- 
dices and desires, and brightened the portals 
with the oil of kindness. 

But in a little press in a corner, there 
dwelt a family of rats, and the woman tried 
to forget them altogether. She said, "I 
have put them out of my life, as though 
they had never been. ' ' Yet she did not 
drive them away, for she said: "The hole 
is dark, and I shall but soil my hands. I 
do not know what may be under their nest. M 

Under the nest were mouldering bones 
and relics of forgotten quarrels. The 
woman said, "If I should rake out all these 
things, I would disturb the order of my 
house. ' ' 

Love came to make his home with her. 
214 



A Clean Heart 

But in the morning the napery was soiled, 
and the floor was strewn with offal and with 
rubbish. The woman was displeased, and 
blamed her child for making all the dirt. . . . 

That night Love came not back. 

Next day the woman cleansed the house 
again, and then sought after him. At even- 
ing she found him, and brought him back 
once more. 

But in the morning the furniture was 
gnawed and the house was foul with dirt. 
The woman scolded her servants, and they 
made defence; when she looked for Love, 
he had gone. 

The rats bred and rioted through the 
house. They grew strong, and took up 
much room. The woman said, "I can only 
forget those rats, for to root them out now, 
would destroy the house. " 

Love came back no more. 



215 



Monopoly. 

The prize which the overworked tutor 
promised, if the elder boys would but be 
quiet for this one term, was given to-day. 
To-day the tutor took Richard and Jack out 
with him, and bought a big gray squirrel, 
— so beautiful ! Tommy was left at home : 
he is quite small. 

Now they have brought the squirrel home, 
and they race upstairs and lock themselves 
into their little room. They are going to 
take Bunny out of the cage. 

But Tommy has heard. His stout little 
feet paddle, paddle, up the long flight. He 
hears the door close. He hears his brothers 
shout. They say, "How shall we get him 
out?" They scream with excitement. 
Tommy is excited, too. He is at the top, 
breathless ; but the door is shut. 

"Please let me in. " No answer. "Oh, 
please, please let me in, — only just for one 
little minute." The children are wild: 
they do not hear. 

216 



Monopoly 

He calls again, again. "Oh, do, do, 
please, only please." They do not answer. 
The door is shut. He sits down on the 
mat, silent, despairing, quietly sobbing. 
On the one side misery, on the other joy; 
but the door is shut. 



217 



In the Jurisdiction of God. 

[The writer has many a time seen that some who 
would fain help forward the kingdom are beguiled 
into exaggeration or dishonesty as a means of gain- 
ing their ends, "bragging a little," they call it. 
He himself realises how the purity of the motive 
strengthens the temptation to this fatal mistake, — 
this falseness which eventually results in an inability 
to distinguish celestial truth from earthly lies. There- 
fore, he writes this fable, and dedicates it to those 
who abhor subterfuge, and believe in the right of 
men to know the truth.] 

A Woman went out to sow the seed of 
tenderness. In the sand she sowed it, and 
nothing but disappointment came of it. 
Therefore, she mixed self-deception and 
weakness and good intentions with the 
sand ; and there sprang up a crooked tree 
which was called Expediency, and from it 
grew gnarled branches of laws. 

She said, "This tree is more convenient 
than the tree of Rectitude; for that will 
neither bend nor break, nor can one twist it 
to suit the circumstances. V 
218 



In the Jurisdiction of God 

She said, "The tree of Rectitude can 
never grow upon earth. " She heaped up 
beautiful white lies about Expediency, and 
sprinkled it with flattery; and she made a 
prop for it out of charity. She said, "It is 
very fair. " 

But the trunk of it was hollow and the 
branches rotten; its flowers were Distrust, 
and its fruit Compromises and Complica- 
tions. 

Yet the Woman ate of the fruit, and gave 
the flowers to her children. Alas! the 
flowers were foetid, and the fruit was poison- 
ous. 

She said: "I meant well when I sowed 
it. Surely, it is a goodly tree; yet it 
brings forth evil fruit ! 

But on the Mountain there was One who 
sowed the seed of Righteousness, and with 
great toil planted it among the rocks, and 
watered it with tears; and that tree grew up 
and blessed the land. 

The Woman looked upon it, and said, 
219 



Things as They Are 

" There are thorns upon it, and its trunk is 
rough and coarse." But its roots broke the 
rocks, and still it spread until the whole 
nation was sheltered under it. And on it 
grew the beautiful flowers of Justice and the 
pleasant fruits of Love. 

The Woman said, " Where that tree 
grows is the Kingdom of Heaven, and they 
who tended it are the children of God. " 






220 



Rise and Progress of a Soul. 

There was a man who cried that life was 
hard, and that all went ill with him. 
Therefore, he snarled at men, and wailed 
that all the world was bad. 

God said to him, "Your hell is in your 
heart.' ' 

The man cried out, "Though I do right- 
eously, yet the wicked beat me down. " 
Therefore, his hand was against every man. 
He sighed that not a God, but devils, ruled 
the world. 

God said, "The school for you is my 
earth." 

Again the man cried out, "There is no 
happiness below for me; for men have 
trampled on my rights, and I have been a 
fool. I shall be happy in a better world. " 

God said, "Such heaven as you conceive 
I give." 

Once more the man cried out: "I am 
not holier than other men, for are not all 
one flesh? In the sins they do and the 

221 



Things as They Are 

fights they make I must needs take my 
part. Yet I am one with God. ' ' 

God answered him, and said, "My 
brother and son, my kingdom is in you." 



222 



An Allegorical Boat. 

That ridiculous Genius could have made 
a fortune if he would only have painted 
things as other people see them. Now 
there is a good demand for pictures of 
"War" and "Peace." "War" has a regi- 
ment of men, nicely dress-parading up a 
hill at double-quick. There is some smoke 
in the middle distance. Here and there a 
man has softly fallen, — presumably killed 
for effect, — a gray war-charger, and so on. 

"Peace" has one of the -same sort of 
men, immeasurably smug, with a woman's 
arm on his neck and several stolid children, 
apparently waiting to be told that they may 
go. Some fruit and a workman's cap — 

The Boating pictures ought to be of eight 
neat collegians with a little coxswain. The 
faces should look like Cheshire cheeses, and 
the figures like tailors' dummies. That 
sort of picture sells. People like that kind. 

But this man, when he got an order, put 
in the foreground of his battle-piece a 
223 



Things as They Are 

greenish corpse, torn from the hip to the 
neck, and a wretch trying to drag himself off 
the dusty road, with his bowels trailing in 
his shadow, and — Well, I won't describe 
it. His "Peace " was a picture of a ragged 
orphaned babe, with cavernous face. From 
dirt and neglect, ulcers — But there! If 
I were to tell you about his pictures as they 
are, you would not buy my book. The 
worst of it was that he labelled them "Sav- 
agery" and " Civilization.' ' 

But I was going to tell you about the 
boat. It was to be a picture of "Progress 
in the Nineteenth Century. '■ Well, on one 
side, in front of the boat, he had a lot of 
people lolling at their ease. They had 
whips in their hands, and seemed to be 
making the ragged people in the stern do 
the rowing. And all the poor-looking peo- 
ple were on the same side, too, so that the 
boat tipped over frightfully. The helms- 
man was perched away up on the gunwale, 
trying to keep the balance; and he must 
have been neglecting his steering, for you 
224 



An Allegorical Boat 

could see a half-circle of foam in their 
wake. 

I asked my Genius what that meant, be- 
sides meaning that the picture would be 
thrown back on his hands. He said "the 
boat is Society, and the people in the 
front are the cunning and the strong, who 
have compelled the lower classes to leave 
their places and to toil for them. That was 
the reason that all were on one side of the 
boat. The intelligent helmsman is doing 
the best he can to keep things straight. 
The figure with the seraphic face, not 
quite finished, is just an ordinary crank, 
climbing up on an oar rigged out over the 
tilting side, and sacrificing comfort and en- 
dangering his support to correct a result of 
social wrong. M 

Now, if Moses or Jeremiah had painted a 
thing like that in biblical times, it might 
have sold. Besides, they weren't depend- 
ent upon the public. But for a commer- 
cial painter ! Why, he could no more 
do it than an editor could admit that the 
225 



Things as They Are 

"policy " of the paper came from the count- 
ing-house. My painter is a totally imprac- 
ticable man. 



226 



Competition. 

It is not generally known that before the 
Indian mutiny, there had been extensive eco- 
nomic discussions among the natives, and 
that at the uprising some interesting socio- 
logical experiments were made by the 
sepoys, which were unfortunately stopped by 
the British guns. 

The Manchester School had long been 
teaching that all restraint of the individual 
was unfair, that each should grab all that 
he could, and that, however unjust the con- 
ditions, there was nothing so good as 
"Laissez faire. " Therefore, when the na- 
tives made their first large capture of the 
English, they proceeded to put these prin- 
ciples in practice, while the band played 
the March of Civilization. They stuffed the 
prisoners into what has most unfairly come 
to be known as the ''black hole ,, of Cal- 
cutta, and left them severely alone. Those 
English malcontents made a great outcry 
because most of them died in the night, from 
227 



Things as They Are 

thirst and heat and suffocation. Now the 
"hole" was no blacker than an ordinary 
coal mine, and it is much easier to die in 
one night than to be worked to death for 
years. 

One of the English gentlemen said to the 
sentry: "Here, you blackguard, we are 
dying in here. You must do something to 
relieve us." 

"You, haven't read 'Malthus,' " returned 
the guard. "In India, population is press- 
ing upon the means of subsistence; and 
war, pestilence, and famine are the means, 
mercifully appointed by God and us, for 
curing this disease." 

"But," said the officer, "our condition is 
horrible. What shall we do? " 

' ' Compete freely among yourselves, ' ' 
answered the man. "Experience shows 
that all attempts from outside to better the 
condition of the weaker and dependent 
classes result, in the end, only in increasing 
misery." 

"But think of our common humanity " — - 
228 



Competition 

"Ah, yes," replied the sentry. "If you 
are not satisfied, go elsewhere: you are 
perishing merely from overcrowding. The 
remedy for that is emigration." 

"But you have made it impossible for us 
to emigrate. We are shut up in here." 

"You suffer," said the guard, "from 
your own weakness and imprudence. Inter- 
ference with the conditions which have 
evolved themselves would be most unwise." 

"You brute!" cried the Englishman. 
"We are trampling upon each other! Give 
us, at least, air and water!" 

"Air and water," replied the sepoy, 
"are the elements of nature which are ap- 
pointed for possession by an overruling 
Power, and on which the proletariat are no 
more entitled to seize than they are to con- 
fiscate the land. " 

"I can't argue," said the officer. "We 
are dying in here for want of what lies open 
all about us. Why won't you let us use 
some of the water which you do not 
need ? ' ' 

229 



Things as They Are 

"Because/' returned the other, "our ap- 
propriation of water has restricted the 
supply, and given it a value, much of which 
is in the hands of widows and orphans. 
This value it would not be right to destroy. 
However, you have the same liberty as 
every one else to buy some water." 

"Buy!" answered the unhappy Briton. 
"You have taken from us everything with 
which we could buy : you have robbed us of 
all we had. " 

"Don't use anarchistic phrases, my 
friend, else I'll shoot you as a striker. 
You are a worthless and discontented lot ; 
and to let you out would be, as Professor 
Gunkum expressed it, 'to subject the newer 
and higher type to the degrading competi- 
tion of the older and lower.' " 

"Well, for mercy's sake, let some of the 
children out, anyhow!" 

"Now I pity you with all my charity 

organization," said the sentry. "But, if I 

were to release you now, you would add to 

the ordinary glut of the labour market; and 

230 



Competition 

I am not going to interfere either with free 
competition or with the survival of the 
fittest." 



231 



Remedial Measures. 

"O sir," cried one of the prisoners in the 
"Black Hole of Calcutta" to the Maharaja, 
as he came to visit the gaol, "pray let us out 
of this. We are in great distress, and dying 
by the dozen. " 

"Dying?" replied the prince. "Then 
something must be done. We must first 
find the extent, and then the cause of your 
distress. " 

So he sent a friendly visitor, who took 
the measure and the weight of each one in 
the hole, and figured out how many feet of 
air he breathed. He made a scientific 
study of the case, and noted the following 
valuable and interesting sociologic conclu- 
sions — -the friendly visitor had a large 
family : — 

"First. Competition is at the root of 
all this suffering. Had the prisoners taken 
turns at the peep-hole in the door of the 
cell, all could have lived till now. 

"Second. Underlying this is human 
232 



Remedial Measures 

greed ; for the stronger ones stopped up 
the breathing-space with their heads, and so 
the weaker perished. 

"Third. There is a maladjustment of 
the social force. If, instead of breathing in 
the air and returning it from their lungs 
into the cell, the prisoners would discharge 
it on the outside, a large number would 
survive. 

"Fourth. Those poor people are prod- 
igal of their water. They drink whole cup- 
fuls at a time: whereas, were they persist- 
ently to breathe through the nose, the 
desire for water would be greatly lessened. 

"Fifth. There is no real scarcity of 
water, as the Ganges and the Mississippi 
hold an abundant supply, which is practi- 
cally free. The heat is an unavoidable in- 
cident of human life, though aggravated by 
the vices and fever of the poor prisoners. 
To open the door as a panacea is a fascinat- 
ing theory; but I am constrained to say 
(else I should lose my job) that the only 
immediate and practical remedy is to miti- 

233 



Things as They Are 

gate their thirst by giving the lower strata 
rags to chew. Much might be done, also, 
by blowing through the key-hole. But the 
only real specifics are: first, education, so 
that they may make the best of their oppor- 
tunities, but not any education that could 
make them discontented; and, second and 
mainly, moral elevation. " 

When the Maharaja read the report, he 
sent to the prisoners a teacher of sloyd 
and a book upon "The Pleasures of Con- 
tent. " And he raised the visitor's salary. 



234 



Sauve Qui Peut. 

When the King was come to his own, his 
soldiers were scattered and few. There- 
»fore, each felt that he must depend upon 
himself and upon the word of the King. 
So, wherever these soldiers went, they over- 
threw the citadels, and the cities surrendered 
saying, "Behold, these are come hither also, 
which have turned the world upside down. " 

With such success the army of the King 
became organised; and, when they sought a 
free country, the soldiers learned to trust to 
the generals and to the artillery. When 
the enemy appeared, each soldier said in his 
heart, "This great army will be victori- 
ous " ; and he added, "So they do not need 
me." "We will surely succeed," said 
every one to himself, "therefore, I need do 
nothing." 

So those poor soldiers were plundered and 
slain, and only the fierce and cunning 
escaped at all. 

The General said, "Those who have 

235 



Things as They Are 

thought have not yet suffered, and those 
who have suffered have not yet thought. ' ' 
But the King bided his time. 



236 



To Satisfy the Hungry Man. 

A Feudal Lord had a big Teutonic Serf. 
The Teuton was dissatisfied. He said he 
would like more comfort and less abuse. 
"But," said his owner, "your miseries are 
due to intemperance. What you need is a 
high license." "Well," said the Serf, 
"let us try it." His condition did not im- 
prove. Then said the Serf, "I need more 
privileges." "Not at all," said the Feudal 
Lord. "Your wretched condition is due to 
drink: what you now need is prohibition. " 
Said the Serf, "That should be enough." 
His case seemed worse than ever. "I want 
less oppressive taxes," said the fellow. 
"Not you," returned the Master. "What 
you lack is a system of indoor and outdoor 
relief." Said the Teuton, "I will try poor 
relief." And he became yet more miser- 
able. 

"I get too little of what I produce," said 
the Serf again. "Nonsense!" replied his 
Lord. "You have too many children : you 
237 



Things as They Are 

require well-organised charity." "Perhaps 
that might suffice, " said the Serf. But his 
state became more pitiable still. And the 
Land Lord remarked: "The Aryan races 
pay too much for food. My government 
experts will show it, " said he. "I demand 
more liberty," said the Serf. "You can 
choose your own overseer, ' ' said the Land- 
owner. "I should govern myself," said the 
fellow. "Oh no," said the Lord. "You 
should buy a patent cook-stove, and save 
the swill." The life of the Teuton grew 
harder and harder. 

"I am going to have co-operation." 
"Dear me!" said the Land Lord. "Take 
universal suffrage instead." The Serf grew 
poorer and shabbier. "Give me a better 
currency," said he. 

"It is time, "said the Land Lord, " to re- 
sist these demands." And he lied to the 
Serf, and wheedled him out of his purpose. 
The Serf asked for just taxation. The 
Land Lord said, "Let us try to satisfy him 
with government ownership of water and 
light." 

238 



To Satisfy the Hungry Man 

The Slave grew hungrier still. ''I must 
take the land," said he. "What you must 
have, " said the Land Lord, as he got up a 
scare of war, "is an increased army and a 
strong government. " 

"I will have your head," said the Man. 



239 



A Business Crash. 

A factor wanted some butcher's chop- 
ping-blocks. So he employed a telegraph 
company to send a message to that effect up 
to Bangor, Maine. The company employed 
a man to deliver it. The agent to whom it 
was addressed hired a gang of woodsmen. 
The men laid in a stock of flour and pork, 
which the farmers had raised, got teams, 
and went into the woods to cut the lumber. 
They floated it down the river to the saw- 
mill. There it was cut into the proper 
lengths by the mill hands, trimmed by the 
carpenter's employees, and loaded, while it 
was still nothing but the rounded trunks 
of trees, into ships by the 'longshoremen. 
The sailors brought the load to New York, 
where a banker refunded to the agent, for 
account of the factor, the wages of all these 
workers. 

Truckmen carted the tree trunks up to 
storage sheds, which had been built by some 
framers for that purpose. The factor em- 
240 



A Business Crash 

ployed commission men to visit the butcher 
shops, and, wherever the chopping-blocks 
looked old or unsanitary, to offer new ones 
at moderate prices. Then the truckmen 
hauled the sections of tree trunks to the 
various shops, and put them in position. 
They were no longer mere trunks of trees : 
they had become part of the butchers' capi- 
tal. 

Meanwhile the factor had made a profit 
on them while they were raw material, and 
contracted with a builder to put up a house 
for him on Long Island. 

Next year the factor wanted to repeat the 
operation. He sent a letter this time, and 
promptly got back word that all the heavily 
timbered land had been bought by a syndi- 
cate, which had induced Congress to put a 
tariff on lumber (so as to encourage Ameri- 
can industry), and that in view of the pro- 
spective rise in value, the syndicate had 
decided to restrict the supply and raise the 
prices, of big timber. 

Upon figuring what he could get for 
241 



Things as They Are 

blocks, the manufacturer replied that he 
could not see anything in it for him. There- 
fore, the agent did not hire those men that 
year, the teams were not needed, and, 
even though the woodsmen had to go hun- 
gry, the corn and bacon could not be bought 
from the farmers, who had expected to find 
a home market for it. Business was dull 
up in Bangor that fall, as the mill hands 
were out of work and the carpenters could 
find nothing to do. The 'longshoremen had 
to strike against a threatened reduction of 
wages, because there were idle hands about 
the docks offering to work for less. The 
butchers got along with the old blocks 
for another year; and the customers ate 
canned beef, because the butchers, the 
banker, the truckmen, and the commission 
men all found business bad, and ascribed it 
variously to " financial uncertainty," "dull 
times," and "over production." 

The factor, wishing to employ his office 
and to do something for which he could get 
pay, sent next to Rockland, to try to get 
242 



A Business Crash 

some limestone, have it burned, and sell it 
here; but he learned that a company which 
owned the Vermont lime quarries had gotten 
hold of the most of the Maine land, and 
were not selling any limestone there. He 
tried to get some iron ore; but the agent 
laughed at him, and said that was the clos- 
est monopoly in the United States, and that 
an outsider had no chance to get in. So 
the factor, whose expenses were running on, 
discharged his clerks and made an assign- 
ment. Bradstreet's said his failure was due 
to too heavy expenditures, and his clerks 
applied to the Charity Organisation Society 
for relief. The officers advised them to go 
to the country, — up to Maine, for instance, 
where there is plenty of work for all. 



243 



The Rev. Heavenly Holmes 

on the Incorruptible 

Inheritance. 

A SERMON TO THE FOUR HUNDRED. 

^Beloved brethren/' — so familiarly is 
it the blessed privilege of even the smallest 
and cheapest christian minister to address 
his employers. — 

My text is, "The earth hath he given to 
the children of men/' — meaning, of course, 
H gentlemen. " 

No man can add to or take away a cubit 
from its breadth. For the earth is the 
Lord's: it is not the product of any man's 
labour. How, then, could you have got it if 
the Lord had not in his mercy given it 
to you ? 

And he has given it, not to all, but to 
those who are able to hold it. But it is 
given as a Trust, and not for you to use 
yourselves. Now the object of all Trusts is 
to restrict production and to raise prices, 
244 



The Incorruptible Inheritance 

And that you are so doing is shown by the 
vacant lands about the city, and by the way 
in which the real estate market is sustained. 

He has given the land to you for an in- 
corruptible inheritance, — the only one that 
neither moth, nor meanness, nor rust can 
destroy, — because you are meek, because 
you come here on Sundays to acknowledge 
that you are what nobody else could venture 
to call you, "miserable sinners. " 

Had not he, in his inscrutable provi- 
dence, given it to you or to your ancestors, 
you would have had to render some service 
to society in order to make a living instead 
of getting it; but by divine favour you 
have now to render service only to the Lord, 
who giveth unto you the spoils of your 
weaker brethren. 

How you should praise his name, and 
how generously should you support his 
temple and the system by which we profit 
so much ! 

But you have other duties besides this. 
You have to contend against the insidious 
245 



Things as They Are 

attacks of sin on the lower classes. The 
primitive Christians contended against 
wickedness in high places, but we refined 
Christians have to contend against it only 
in the slums, — not, to be sure, in person, 
but through proper missionaries and corpora- 
tions. 

I have here one of the annual reports of 
the New York Charity Organisation So- 
ciety, which is given as freely as the gospel 
in a mission church to all that apply. It 
gives a table of the causes of pauperism, 
with an article by an expensive professor, 
explaining them away, — the best method, 
my brethren, of avoiding an unpleasant dis- 
covery ! 

By offering congenial work to all "de- 
serving cases" at sawing wood for fifty 
cents per day, this excellent institution re- 
futes the atheistic cry that the Creator has 
not provided sufficient employment to sup- 
port every one. We may easily imagine 
the exhilaration which comes from a few 
hours of this gentle exercise before break - 
246 



The Incorruptible Inheritance 

fast. Yet I grieve to say that a statistical 
table (the publication of which was lately 
discontinued) shows that about one man in 
ten refuses this simple and joyous work. 
My brethren, there are in this city three 
million persons. If one in every ten be un- 
willing to work, we have at our very doors 
the appalling total of three hundred thou- 
sand men in voluntarily idle — I mean idle 
voluntarily. 

Why do not these people go to the fields? 
Because, my brethren, they are wicked. 
They will not live by faith, nor trust the 
Lord to provide for their children, while 
they are learning to do farm work. Nay, 
they fear to be alone in the country with 
their own evil thoughts. Therefore hath the 
Almighty turned the country over to you. 

Their Agitators say that they have to go 
too far to find land, that you have taken it 
all up, that you have put up fences and 
prices, so that the children of God cannot 
get at his earth. 

But you have taken only the land which 
247 



Things as They Are 

people might easily use. Boundless and 
inaccessible tracts, for which no one can 
find a market, may still be had at nomi- 
nal prices. Ay, in our own State, farms 
abandoned by tenants who failed to make a 
living out of them may be bought for a song 
— above the encumbrances. 

That they failed was due to their igno- 
rance, my brethren. You should daily bow 
in gratitude that you are educated to gain a 
living at anything or at nothing. For, look 
again at our statistics. The dreadful fact 
stares us in the face that of the Associa- 
tion's "cases" nearly sixteen per cent, are 
unable to read and write. If they were in- 
telligent, they might own newspapers and 
churches, editors and advocates, just as you 
do. Why do the children of these people 
insist on working in shops or factories in- 
stead of going to school and becoming in- 
telligent like you? 

Because, my brethren, they are shiftless 
and inefficient, the very words of the in- 
spired report, — nearly five per cent, are 
. 248 



! 



The Incorruptible Inheritance 

1 'shiftless and inefficient." This table 
does not, of course, give the figures as to 
babies, which you know are twice as numer- 
ous as are adults; but we may conclude that 
frightful vices are, at least, equally prev- 
alent among the pauper young. Counting 
the children, then, we have fifteen per cent, 
of the poor to be classed as " shiftless and 
inefficient. " 

These are mostly ignorant foreigners who 
are overwhelming our lovely civilisation. 
As the table observes, only one-third of 
these people, even in the port of New York, 
are American born. 

What wonder, then, that these degraded 
and dependent aliens are plunged in want ! 
Here are other causes given, namely: "rov- 
ing disposition," nearly one in five hundred 
and fifty; "dishonesty" and "imprisonment 
of bread-winners," more than one per cent. ! 
and "lack of employment" and "poorly 
paid employment," forty-four per cent. 

It is horrible that in a civilised country 
"dishonesty" and punishment for crime 
249 



Things as They Are 

and low wages should reduce forty-five per 
cent, of our population to penury. Truly, 
as the blessed Book tells us, their "hearts 
are deceitful above all things and desper- 
ately wicked. " 

But this report gives some still more ap- 
palling figures. It shows that the giant 
evil of intemperance accounts for another 
one in ten. How startling and yet how 
soothing is this figure! An employer, for 
some reason, is reducing his help. Most 
employers are. Gradually, he lets those 
men go who are not quite steady. One of 
these men applies for relief to our delight- 
ful Society. Any one in want can freely 
apply. We send our visitor to find why he 
left his last place, and the employer says he 
laid him off because he was irregular in his 
habits. Ah ! we know the sin and shame 
involved in that ; and our superintendent 
tells the man it is his own fault, and he can 
do nothing for him except to report on his 
case. Or, lest we should seem unfeeling, 
we tell him to come back in a week, and 
then refer him to the police. 
250 



The Incorruptible Inheritance 

But time fails me: therefore, I pass over 
the computation that fifty per cent, of the 
"cases" of poverty need employment rather 
than relief. That is probably a misprint. 
But, if not, why do not the remaining forty 
per cent, reduced to pauperism by accident, 
disease, or old age, and so on, provide 
against such contingencies? Because, be- 
loved, they are the poor whom "we will 
have always with us," — else we should 
have to work. 

The table of statistics is well worth the 
price of your annual subscription to the So- 
ciety; and you get in addition a placard re- 
ferring all applicants to it, which will save 
you twice as much. 

These people must be dealt with through 
charitable and church and military organisa- 
tions. It behooves us to remember that, 
with regard to those by whose labours we 
live, we are, as our Master said, "but as 
sheep among wolves." At any moment 
their unbridled appetites may drive the mul- 
titudes to use the strength of which they are 
251 



Things as They Are 

already conscious. They submit, not so 
much from stupidity as because each of 
them thinks he has a chance in the game of 
grab. Therefore, they are somewhat content 
to hope against hope. When any realise 
that all their chance in this world is gone, 
the Church holds up a prospect of a better 
world, where all will be as the pew-holders 
of this church, who think of nothing but 
being happy, and know neither cold nor 
want nor shame, — who have learned in 
whatsoever state society is, therewith to be 
content. 

May the Lord give us peace in our time, 
and hasten the day when the wicked shall 
cease from troubling us, when, from the least 
unto the greatest, all may be content — 
with our great gain ! Amen. 



252 



Grief, and the End of Grief. 

He knew injustice had been done. The 
world looks very dark when one is only six 
and injustice has been done. 

Therefore, he rested his curly head upon 
his chubby hands, just as once he saw his 
mother do. He shook with sobs, and the 
tears ran down his little nose and fell upon 
the dusty ground. And in the dust they 
made a dark, round hole, just like the evil 
world. But overhead the light clouds 
drifted and the bright sun shone. 

A little ant toiled through the hills of 
sand; and, when it reached the tear-wet spot, 
its burden slipped into the hole. The ant 
rolled after it; and a tiny, dusty land-slide 
followed it. 

The child had pity on the ant, and got a 
little straw to help it out. He brushed the 
sand into the hole; and the insect took its 
burden up again, and walked its rugged 
way. 

The sun dried up the tear-wet dust. The 
253 



Things as They Are 

child's sobs ceased, for he was comforted; 
and he looked up, and saw the sun. 

The world looks very bright when one is 
only six, and kindness has been done. 



254 



The Division of Labour. 

In the old times a man made his 
plans, did his work, received his product, 
said it was his right, and thanked his God 
that there was enough for all, so no one 
need starve. Now, an employer makes the 
plans, a labourer does the work, a monopo- 
list receives the product, a professor says it 
is all right, and a clergyman thanks his 
God there is too much for some, so no one 
need care. 



255 



The Little Rationalist. 

The superintendent's voice rolled out 
musically as he read those beautiful verses, 
Matthew vi. 26, 28, 29: — 

" Behold the fowls of the air: for they 
sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather 
into barns : yet your heavenly Father feedeth 
them. Are ye not much better than they ? 

"And why take ye thought for raiment? 
Consider the lilies of the field, how they 
grow : they toil not, neither do they spin : 

"And yet I say " — 

"Say, mister," piped up that Bryan boy, 
"if I owned the land and charged them 
lilies rent, then where would they grow? " 

"Why, you naughty boy! What a ques- 
tion! God could pay, — why, God owns all 
the land himself. That is — er — you're 
disturbing the school, and you'd better go 
home. " 

"Well, God can't feed no fowls on my 
land," said the child, as he was led out by 
the ear, "without he pays me the rent." 
256 



The Golden Dollar and the 
Mergen-thaler. 

A Speculator came to the Land of the 
Free; and, the land being free, he soon ap- 
propriated it to himself. Those who wished 
to work on the land itself, or on things 
furnished by the land, became unsatisfied in 
body and dissatisfied in mind. The Farmers 
first felt the restraint. Said they : — 

"We have to use poor land, or else pay a 
third of our crops for the use of good land. 
We" — 

"Stop, " said the Speculator. "It is not 
monopoly that is the matter, but the money 
you have. ' ' 

"But we haven't any money," said they. 

"Perhaps not," said the Speculator. 
"But I have, and the Golden Thaler makes 
the Farmer poor." 

Those who supported his interest added : — 

"Farming is very bad, but you should 
work fifteen hours instead of ten. Then 
you can all live." 

257 



Things as They Are 

"That's long hours," said the Farmers. 

"You are a lot of Anarchists, " said the 
Speculator. 

The Speculator printed all this for gen- 
eral circulation. When the Printers saw it, 
they did not believe it. Said they : — 

"The Farmer and the Mechanic can't get 
at the resources of the earth : therefore, they 
can't earn anything to pay for what we 
print. We" — 

"Oh, no: it isn't I that make the 
trouble," said the Speculator. "It is the 
machines we have." 

"But we haven't any machines," said 
the Printers. 

"True; but I have," replied the Specu 
lator. "It is the Mergen Thaler that makes 
Printers poor." 

Those who were attached to the Monopoly 
system added : — 

"Business certainly is bad, but you 
should work but five days a week. Then 
there will be enough work for you all. " 

"That's short wages," said the Printers. 
258 



Mergen-thaler 

" You' re a pack of Demagogues," said 
the Speculator. 

"We don't want more work," said the 
Farmers. 

"We don't want less work," said the 
Printers. 

"We want the Earth," said both together. 

"The people are crazy about those social- 
ist ideas," said the Speculator. "We need 
a bigger standing army and a war." 



259 



Reconstruction. 

Three turbulent soldiers lay in gaol. 
Pending their trial, they strove to get out. 
They tried to bribe the gaolers, they rea- 
soned with the turnkeys, they appealed con- 
stantly to the Governor, and betweentimes 
they tunnelled under the wall. 

One of them made a plan to blow up the 
gaol. Said the first prisoner, as they worked 
together, "When we've broken down the 
gaol, we'll build an orphan asylum here. " 

"We will not," said the second, "orphan 
asylums mean slavery. " 

"It's a monument we'll build to Henry 
George," said the third. 

With that they stopped the work, and 
fell to fighting. At that moment the be- 
nevolent warden came in. Said he: "You 
agitators here are making a mistake. There 
isn't any outside to this gaol : the best we 
can do is to improve the condition of the 
poor within. " So he put them in a stronger 
cell. 

They said, "Had we not quarrelled, we 
would have been free." 
260 



Lords of the Air. 

It was in 1903 that the Supreme Court of 
the United States found for the plaintiff in 
the great case of Simon Magus against the 
mayor, aldermen, etc., of Olathe, Kansas. 
The case was this: A part of Olathe was 
built on the lands owned by Magus, who ac- 
quired an enormous fortune by selling them. 
He laid out streets, granting rights of way, 
"but reserving to himself all other rights in 
the streets/' Nevertheless, the people of 
Kansas, as the complaint set forth, "wrong- 
fully and maliciously assumed to breathe 
the air in said streets, and committed other 
trespasses upon the rights of said Magus in 
said air. " 

The court held, following the "single 
tax ' ' case (Tawresey v. the Town of Dover, 
Superior Court of Kent County, Delaware), 
that the street was merely for passage. 

This finding occasioned greater surprise 
than the income tax decision of some years 
past (Pollock v. Farmers' Loan and Trust 
261 



Things as They Are 

Company and Hyde v. Continental Trust 
Company, 158 U. S. 601), and a rehearing 
was held. 

It was urged that the use of the air was 
necessary to the right of way, and was there- 
fore included in it. But the learned judges 
pointed out that it is just as necessary to 
be fed as to breathe, in order to travel ; and 
yet, although food, unlike air, is actually 
produced from the ground, no one claimed 
the right to grow food product on the high- 
way as an incident to its use. 

The court urged with much force that the 
railroads also are highways, in which the 
people have special rights (Munn v. People 
of Illinois, 94 U. S. Supreme Court), and 
that cars were necessary to their use, but 
that it could not be claimed that the right 
to the use of the road-bed gives a right to 
the free use of the cars. 

It was urged that the finding was in vio- 
lation of the right of the people peaceably 
to assemble, as provided in Amendment 1, 
United States Constitution. But, citing 
262 



Lords of the Air 

The Commonwealth v. Davis (Massachu- 
setts Law Reports, June, 1897), the court 
held that men might be prohibited from 
assembling, preaching, breathing, or doing 
anything else in the streets, and that, 
by taking the proper steps and paying the 
fee, any citizen could obtain license to 
breathe the air in public highways (same 
case, 140 Mass. 485). 

Laws taxing immigration had been uni- 
formly upheld (Edye et al. v. Robertson, 
Circuit Court, E. D. N. Y. 1883); though 
such laws deny the use, not only of the 
air, but even of access, except upon pay- 
ment of the fee. It was further said that 
the ordinances opening the streets, in their 
form, exclude such use, and that the prin- 
ciple of the ordinance is constitutional 
(Dillon's Municipal Corporations, p. 250, 
2d ed. ). 

The new doctrine was extended, and on 

the principle laid down in Mackall v. Ratch- 

ford, 82 F. 41, injunctions were obtained 

against strikers, that breathed the air upon 

263 



Things as They Are 

roads belonging to the company. The 
Appellate Court justly said, in sustaining 
the injunctions, that common property in 
air worked very well in primitive times; 
but so did common property in land. The 
general experience of mankind, however, 
had improved upon such plans. "There 
is no force," said the learned court, "in 
the strenuous contention of counsel for the 
defendants that the doctrine of rights in air 
is new; for we find in Blackstone, Book 
II., chapter xxvi., section 31 : ' Ancient 
Lights. — Thus, too, the benefit of the 
elements, the light, the air, and the 
water, can be appropriated only by occu- 
pancy. If I have an ancient window over- 
looking my neighbour's ground, he may not 
erect any blind to obstruct the light.' It 
follows that easements of wind, and even of 
light, were, and still are, allowed in Eng- 
land. 

Nor is the decision of the lower court in 
contravention of the Fifth Amendment to 
the Constitution of the United States, guar- 
264 



Lords of the Air 

anteeing the right to life and liberty; for 
it is open to any one to become an air lord. 

(See cases cited on behalf of defendant 
in Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge, 
7 Pick. 344 Mass.) 

The decision was quickly followed in the 
House of Lords, the Chamber of Deputies, 
and the high courts of other countries ; and, 
as nearly all land-owners have rights in the 
streets, numerous suits were instituted. 

In fact, one shyster attorney, the owner 
of a little plot which was mortgaged for all 
it was worth, had summonses printed, and, 
relying upon the principle that every one 
has a right to sue every one else, served 
them upon all that passed, at the rate of 
several hundred a day. Nearly every one 
failed to answer, and the costs brought 
him in a pretty fortune. 

Capital came to the rescue; the Pneu- 
matic Tube Company, which got a fran- 
chise in 1897 to lay tubes under New 
York streets, supplied "penny-in-the-slot" 
flexible tubes, from which air might be 
265 



Things as They Are 

inhaled, as pedestrians passed over land 
whose proprietors had reserved their rights 
in air. Boxes of condensed air, to be car- 
ried on the back, were also sold at a 
nominal charge. 

Knowing that the poorest boy might be- 
come an air lord himself, just as he might 
become President, and that "competition 
among owners would keep prices down to a 
reasonable figure/' just as it had kept down 
rents, the people acquiesced, and were quite 
as contented as they are now. 



266 



The Natural Bent 

A Wolf there was, and he was ravenous 
and huge. He snapped at his fellows, and 
would not hunt with the pack. He ate his 
cubs, and, because he was fierce and swift, 
he killed more prey than he could eat. 

God blessed his brute, and said to him, 
"Feast on your cubs, and eat their mother, 
too; for there is nothing better for a Wolf. " 

A Pariah-dog there was, and he was 
strong and churlish. The hand that caressed 
him he bit. In the night he went sheep- 
stealing, till watch-dogs attacked him. 
Then he ran away, and saved his skin. 

God blessed his cur, and said, "Go, fill 
yourself with flesh, and tear the friendly 
hand; for that is the best you know. " 

A Hound there was, and he was cunning 
and sharp. He hunted game, and watched 
the house. But, when he could, he stole; 
and he lived in fear of the whip. 

God blessed his creature, saying to him, 
"Ay, steal the game, and fear the lash; for 
only so you may learn." 
267 



Things as They Are 

A Mastiff there was, and he loved the 
children; and, when gypsies stole his mas- 
ter's sheep, he flew upon the men. But 
with other dogs he fought, and he would 
leave his charge for strife. 

God blessed his dog, and said, "Yes, 
guard the sheep, and fight till your flesh is 
torn to shreds ; for that is the way I teach. ' ' 

For Beast or Man learns only by working 
out experience. Dog eats dog in war, and 
what we call sins and consequences are but 
lessons in the primer of our Nature's God. 



268 



An Imaginary Conversation. 

We pray, "Give us this day our daily 
bread. M Now suppose the Lord should say : 
"Come, let us reason together. What ex- 
actly do you want me to do? M We would 
say, "Send down a shower of bread, like the 
manna. " And the Lord would answer: "If 
I do, it will belong, under your law, to the 
owners of land. Do you all own land?" 
And we should be obliged to say, "No: the 
poor, who do not own any, could only pick 
up what was untrampled in the streets." 
Then God would say, "Why, that isn't a 
satisfactory way of relieving poverty." 

He might continue: "Where does your 
bread come from ? From the land by labour, 
does it not?" "Yes." "Well," he 
would say, "most of your own country is 
still vacant and unused. All the inhabi- 
tants of your world could go into your 
State of Texas alone, and leave the rest of 
the earth empty and desolate; yet there 
would be fewer than ten persons — say, two 
269 



Things as They Are 

families — to the acre. Now you don't 
want me to make more land, do you?' 
"No, " the labourer would say. "We 
voters have made laws which encourage a 
few to take all land and do nothing with 
it" "Well," the Most High would 
answer, "it is not to me you should make 
this prayer, but to yourselves and to your 
fellows. I have given you your daily bread 
in the best possible way, by offering you a 
chance to work for it ; and you have put it 
out of your hands. " 



270 



The Submerged Tenth. 

A Charitable Person had a great house, 
the cellar of which was flooded with water, 
so that his servants, who lived there, were 
in misery. 

Every day, therefore, knowing that damp- 
ness caused malaria, the Person dried them 
off, and dosed them with quinia. When 
some of the servants objected, he called the 
Board of Health, which "treated" them by 
force. 

A few of the neighbours would occasion- 
ally bail out pailfuls of the water. "See," 
said they, "how we are relieving poverty." 
One man of large philanthropy contracted 
for a pump, at which he worked both day 
and night, so that he broke down his health. 
The water he had pumped out soaked back 
again through the lower walls. 

Now there was a spring, which was in- 
tended to supply the house with water; but 
it had been diverted from its course, so that 
there was no water in the pipes, but only in 
the cellar. 

271 



Things as They Are 

The Benevolent Person said, "God made 
these people poor, that he might arouse in 
me divine compassion. " His Wife said: 
"Oh, how good you are! Besides, if there 
were not such poor, who would carry up water 
for us?" His Son said, "Yes, but let 
me turn the spring back into its course, so 
that the water will flow into all the pipes, 
and we will stop this wretchedness. " 

The charitable person answered, "I am 
not familiar with your theories of springs, 
but experience teaches me that there is no 
cure-all. " 

His Daughter, who was a sweet girl-grad- 
uate, said, "To understand the needs of 
people, one needs to live among them." 
Therefore, she made a college settlement in 
the cellar. After six months' residence 
among the poor, she said that what the lower 
classes chiefly needed was a boat. 



272 



The Public Beneficiary. 

A Man wanted to build a little house 
for himself. So he went to one of the 
new towns, near the city, and said to the 
Land -owner, "What do you ask for your 
Boomhurst lots? " Said he, "Five hundred 
dollars a lot. " "Nonsense!" said the 
Man. "Why, I can go right over to Spec- 
ville, at the other side of the city, where 
the land is just as good as yours, and just 
as near the centre, and just as well situated, 
and buy lots for a hundred dollars a lot; 
and you ask five!" "Well," said the 
Land-owner, "I suppose you can in Spec- 
ville. But over there, when you step out 
of your door, you will step ankle-deep in 
mud : now, we have good pavements. Over 
there, when you come home at night, you 
have to carry a lantern ; but we have city 
lights. There you have to dig a well in the 
back yard, and haul up your water; but 
we've got public water- works. There, if 
your house catches fire, it may burn down; 
273 



Things as They Are 

but we've a good fire department. Over 
there, your children will grow up without 
education, but here we have a public school. 
Over there, if somebody annoys your wife 
when your' re away, you have no help; but 
we have uniformed police. Now wouldn't 
you rather pay five hundred dollars for my 
lots, with all these improvements, than pay 
one hundred dollars over there? " "Well," 
said the Man, "I suppose I would." 

So he bought his lot; and, being a me- 
chanical sort of fellow, he started to put 
up his house. He hadn't got more than the 
second tier of beams up, when some one 
tapped him on the shoulder. "Got a bill 
for you." "Bill for me?" says he. "I 
haven't bought anything here." "No," 
says the man, "I'm the Tax Collector." 
"The Tax Collector? Oh! Well, what 
are taxes for?" "Why," said the Tax 
Collector, "they're for public streets and 
lights and water-works and fire department 
and schools and police." "Why," said 
the man, "I paid for those things when I 
274 



1 






The Public Beneficiary 

bought my lot." "So you did," said the 
Tax Collector. "So you did. But you 
paid the wrong man, and you'll have to pay 
it over again to me every year hereafter." 



275 



The Right to the Use of 
the Man. 

Several persons laid claim to a native of 
Borioboola Gha. Now this native was an 
Anarchist or something, and contended that 
he could not rightfully be made private 
property. So the matter came up in the 
Court of Borioboola Equity. 

Captain Cook set up that he had dis- 
covered the man. "No one knew about 
him, " said he, "except his family, until I 
came and found him : therefore, he is mine. " 

"Not at all," answered Mr. Leo Briton. 
"I came into possession of him by slaying 
some of his defenders, and driving away the 
rest : therefore, he belongs to me and to my 
grantees. ' ' 

Mr. Monopoli's attorney here remarked 
that his client had appropriated this Ind- 
ian's great-grandfather, and that the lapse 
of time and the statute of limitations had 
confirmed his client's possession of the 
whole family. 

276 



The Use of the Man 

There appeared also the sons of Captain 
Kidd, who admitted that they had acquired 
their title "by violence, fraud, the preroga- 
tive of force, and the claims of superior cun- 
ning, " but urged that immemorial custom 
and the wisdom of the ages had confirmed 
their possession also. They said, "You 
would not strip poor orphans of their prop- 
erty?" 

"Gentlemen," said Mr. Socialis, "your 
claims are merely theoretical : the unim- 
proved value of this man, to which you lay 
claim, is nothing. I taught him to read 
and to work, and I furnished him the tools. 
I have indissolubly mingled my labour with 
him ; so hand him over to me. ' ' 

At this moment a wail was heard, and 
Mrs. Poor Widow rushed into court. She 
cried: "I bought this Indian, with all his 
incidents, from the grantees of Mr. Briton. 
I gave for my estate in him a full equivalent 
of honestly earned wealth. Society has rat- 
ified the purchase by constitutions and fugi- 
tive slave laws, and the Church has sancti- 
277 



Things as They Are 

fied my title by the authority of Holy 
Writ." 

As it was clear that the man would be 
dead before the court could establish the 
title to him, the matter was referred to Mr. 
Christian Civilisation, who handed down 
the following decision: "Such claims can 
never make a title to anything except prod- 
ucts of labour. You did not make this 
man, and he is not a piece of land. There- 
fore, chattel slavery must be abolished: but 
this man must earn his living in the sweat 
of his brow, and your living in the rent of 
your land. Let judgment be entered ac- 
cordingly." 



278 



The Consolations of Scien- 
tific Religion. 

The Tigress had been eating her cubs. 
Having a little indigestion, she was in- 
clined to repent; but philosophy came to 
her aid. 

"Rapine," she reflected, "is the law of 
existence. See how the fleas are biting 
me." She licked her chops. "The sur- 
vival of the fittest," thought she, "is the 
way of progress for the race." She looked 
at the last cub. "Great rewards and fearful 
punishments," she sighed, as she scrunched 
its head, "are necessary to make us do our 
best." She settled herself to sleep. 
"There will be no change," she added 
drowsily, "till consciousness awakes in 
cubs." 

Society is a Tigress. 



279 



Relative Right. 

"I am wasting my strength,' ' said I to 
the Prophet, "on these 'reforms.' The 
people are stupid or crazy " — 

"A team was running away," said the 
Prophet; "and I saw three that stood by 
their path. One said: 'The beasts are 
going wrong. If I stand up against them, 
they will surely run over me. ' So he ran 
sidewise at them, and sheered them out of 
the road, so that the wagon was broken, and 
the horses plunged wildly on. 

"Another said, 'That did no good.' So 
he sprang in their way, and waved his arms. 
Before the horses could turn, the wagon-pole 
struck him, and the team ran on. 

"The third said nothing. But, as the 
brutes turned up the road, he began to run 
the same way they were going; and, as they 
were gaining on him, he seized the reins 
and stopped the team." 

I said, "Do you mean that we should go 
wrong because others do ? ' ' 
280 



Relative Right 

"My son," said the Prophet, "the man 
ran the same way as the horse; yet he went 
right, not wrong. " 



281 



All Satisfied. 

A labourer's Boss quarrelled with a 
journeyman. The Boss kindly offered the 
foreman five dollars to fight the journeyman. 
The foreman grabbed the labourer's coat to 
wrap around his arm. "This is a righteous 
war," said the foreman. "Here have I 
made five dollars by it already." 

In the fight the coat was torn to shreds. 
So the Boss paid the labourer five dollars 
for the coat. "See," said the labourer, 
"what a good thing for me is war! Here 
have I got a big price for my coat, and 
a Dutch Sweater has found employment 
making another. " 

Though he got his jaw broken in the 
fight, the foreman finally thrashed the jour- 
neyman. The gratified foreman and the 
patriotic Boss voted twenty dollars (out of 
the shop wages) to pay the expenses of the 
fight and a pension for the foreman. 

Their Representative charged ten dollars 
for collecting the tax from the foreman and 
282 






Things as They Are 

the labourer. "See," said their Represen- 
tative, "what a good thing for me is war." 
The foreman did not answer, for his jaw 
was broken. 

"Me, too!" said the Boss. 

"It's a fat thing for me," said the Dutch- 
man. 

"Urn," said the labourer. "My wits 
were a fat thing, too ! " 



283 



" Separate from Sinners. ,, 

I said: "I will separate myself from the 
world, O Lord. My soul is white, and I 
am weary of the sins of men." 

God said: "Your hands are red. How 
came your soul so white? " 

I answered: "Lord, it is a bloody world; 
and generations of men have suffered from 
their sins. I have profited by their errors. 
Have I not seen how evil spots the soul? I 
have kept mine white. " 

"Are all your brethren's souls now 
white? " said God. 

I hung my head. 

"Go back to your work"; said God. 
"you have learned in their pains, and you 
must suffer in their penalties. " 



284 



An Appeal to Force. 

A Missionary went to enlighten the Can- 
nibals; but the Chiefs said that it was the 
natural condition of common people to be 
eaten by their rulers; and would not listen 
at all. The Priests said that his doctrines 
were contrary to the Sacred Books, and that 
the Gods would reward those who were 
eaten. Therefore, the missionary turned to 
the poor. 

Then the officials of the tribe called him 
a demagogue and a foreigner; and their 
party, with a political club, rebuked him 
at the polls. 

The Commercial Savages said, "We eat 
our neighbour, as he would eat us," which 
is the Golden Rule of trade. 

The Devout Men of the age said that 
there was over-population, and that the 
divine intent was that the surplus should be 
eaten. 

The Philosophers explained that the 
sages of old had always been man-eaters. 
285 



Things as They Are 

They showed, also, that the strong and in- 
telligent must eat the weak and stupid; for 
this was the law of progress. 

The Orthodox Cannibals said, "Men 
are black and good for nothing, but they 
are foreordained to be served on toast. M 

The Privileged Classes said that it was 
rank dishonesty to deprive the poor widow 
and the orphan of their means of subsist- 
ence. They clearly showed that to allow 
the rabble to be uneaten would be to over- 
turn Society. 

The Missionary insisted, nevertheless, 
that men should not be eaten. The rulers 
called him an Anarchist and a Bryanite, 
and ate him, too. 

But next year two missionaries came. 



286 



A Brother's Keeper. 

"Ha! Help, hel" — The Bank Direc- 
tor threw up his arms, and the water choked 
his cry. He came to the surface again, and 
saw for a second the broken dock, the huge 
confusion, — a stout lady held afloat by the 
air under her skirts, her feet kicking ludi- 
crously beneath the silk ; — the new-launched 
ship. He gasped for breath, and took the 
water in: it was like a strangling hand up 
on his throat. He felt that he had been a 
good man ; surely he would be saved ! . . . 
It seemed as if he floated gently through the 
air. He had a buzzing in his ears. Then 
quiet and dreams, — such dreams : they come 
and go. — 

A strong man wanders wearily, foul- 
smelling and unkempt. He looks in vain 
for work, for every one refuses him. He 
fumbles in the offal for a scrap of food, and 
drains the beer-kegs out. At last he finds 
a ragged plot of land, and breaks the soil. 
He borrows a little seed and tools. His 
287 



Things as They Are 

plants begin to sprout. A policeman takes 
him roughly by the arm; scuffling, he 
strikes him with his club, and throws him 
into a cell ; and, as he locks the door, the 
policeman's face comes into the light: it is 
the Director's face. He screams: "It was 
not I did that. The land was mine by law. 
It was the Court that dispossessed " — 

The Director feels the people lift his 
arms. . . . 

A handsome boy is reeling down the 
street, shouting a maudlin song. An old 
man leads him on — they look alike. A 
door opens in a low street, and both go in. 
There are lights and wine-bottles and dice. 
The lad drinks; he is getting stupid now, 
the old man turns the lad's pockets out, and 
throws him into the street. The blood spouts 
from the boy's ears, and the old man looks 
around. God! It is the Director's face! 
He shrieks: "I never have done that! It 
is my only son. I gave him everything he 
asked. What more was there that I could 
do ? I had no time ' ' — 
288 



A Brother's Keeper 

The Director is conscious that men are 
putting warm things to his feet. . . . 

On a cot lies a little child; its eyes are 
burned with fever, and its pinched lips 
crack. Its mother totters home, she is so 
tired; but light is in her eyes; for in her 
pail is the food, and in a tiny packet the 
costly medicine that the doctor has pre- 
scribed. Behind her glides a thief; in 
the packet he pricks a hole, and into the 
pail he drops a deadly adulterant. The 
mother looks about — the medicine has 
been lost, she thinks. Tears are in her 
eyes, but she gives the baby what she has. 
A quiver shakes the little creature's frame. 
The mother shrieks, the thief looks 
proudly round. His face is the Director's 
own! "I did not do that ! I got my profits 
by the laws the same as other men. It was 
the tax that took" — 

The Director knows that men are rubbing 
his limbs. . . . 

A bare, mean room, and across the bed a 
girl, partly undressed. Beside the bed a 
2.89 



Things as They Are 

man in his underclothes. The girl's cheeks 
and neck, down to her little breasts, are 
crimson with shame; and she is crying 
timidly. She sobs, * 'Mamma! " then stops. 
The man turns angrily. God pity him! 
His face is the Director's face! "I never 
did such things as that! I paid the market 
price for labour in the store. It was want 
that drove her to that life. I could not 
help — Ha ! these are no dreams ! ' ' 

. . . "It is no use," said the Doctor. 
"He is dead, quite dead, — probably from 
shock. What a loss he will be to So- 
ciety !" 



2$0 



A Visiouary. 

The interpreter took me by the hand, and 
led me into a cave, across the mouth of which 
was a great gully; and one standing on the 
hither side of the gully was building with 
bridge planks. But, because he could not 
reach to the further side, he built the frame 
of a bridge straight up toward heaven. 

Then said I, 'Why does he build in the 
air, for in that manner he can never span 
the gulf ?" 

The interpreter answered, "Wait and 
see. M And I saw that the man climbed to 
the top of his framework; and, because he 
greatly desired to span the gulf, he built 
out on the side which was toward the oppo- 
site bank. When he had builded thus for a 
long time, the weight of the timbers over- 
balanced the framework, so that it fell across 
the gulf; and it was a bridge for all men to 
walk upon. 

Then said I, "What means this?" The 
interpreter replied: "He whom you saw is 
291 



Things as They Are 

an Idealist, who seems to arrive at nothing, 
so that men say he is impractical; yet is 
his mind fixed upon making an advance. 
Now, when he finds no way of going for- 
ward, he aspires to go higher. In the ful- 
ness of time his desire creates a way, and 
the bridge overbalances, so that it spans the 
chasm. " 

I asked of him, "But what of the man? ,: 
Then answered the interpreter: "His body 
was crushed in the overturn. Nevertheless, 
he built the bridge and went over it; 'Yea/ 
saith the Spirit, 'for they rest from their 
labours, and their works do follow them. ' 



292 



OCT 14' 1899 



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